A series of unfortunate events

I've been tracking Michael Wolf's  Google street view project A Series of Unfortunate Events for the last couple of months--mainly out of my own fascination with Google's ambitious mapping project. 

In a similar vein, back in 2009, Jon Rafman posted and discussed a series of enigmatic pictures captured from Google street views. Is it art? Is it reportage? Is this some new take on appropriation?


While Rafman's images were often quite lyrical, Wolf's project is much more disturbing. Wolf leaves us with a collection of haunting images of car accidents, school yard bullying, drive-by shootings and heavily armed men who wonder through crowded streets, all seemingly captured by Google's car-mounted robot cameras.   We see the world through the lens of a casually callous nine-eyed camera. Now I see that he's just received honorable mention from the World Press Association's annual awards.
Wolf sees his project as a portend of things to come. He was recently interviewd in the British Journal of Photography. There he suggests that "a large part of our future will be the curating of all these images. Can you imagine the number of images stored in our world today? It's unlimited. In 100 years, there will be professions such as 'hard-drive miners', whose mission will be finding hard-drives in electronic junkyards and developing software to sort these images. And then there will be art projects and sociological projects created using images mined from electronic storages."

College Art Association panel

Having chaired a panel on Design Writing at the annual CAA conference, I've grown more and more interested in design curricula and how writing, communications, and design studies actually relate to one another.  Above all, the conference highlighted some serious gaps in design studies education in the United States.  This needs to be more carefully scrutinized; if design studies continues to grow as an academic discipline, it's essential that the strengths of a liberal education be brought to the table.