Paolo Cirio brings ghosts to life. At least, he pulls them out of their eternal resting places in the digital expanse of Google Street View and paints them into three-dimensional reality. Since last year, the Turin-born artist has been creating life-sized portraits of pedestrians, city-dwellers, and anyone else caught by the roaming eye of Google’s slow-cruising surveillance mobiles. The ghosts have haunted the streets of London, Berlin, and New York City.
It’s a blunt but clever undertaking. Cirio scans Street View for locations or people he finds interesting, settles on a subject, and prints them out on a large sheet of poster paper. He then takes the inevitably blurry and pixelated person and slathers them onto the exact spot where they’ve been immortalized on Street View—thus becoming a real-life Street Ghost. Viewed on the computer screen, it can be hard to tell the Street View still from the physical apparition.