The Google Street View car is the ultimate street photographer, methodically scouring the streets and documenting what it sees. The extensive online archive of semi-automated imagery, constantly refreshing, and relentlessly recording the publicly accessible visual world, is an irresistible and seemingly endless source of raw photographic material. Though these images had already been taken, they hadn’t necessarily been seen; there are just too many. It became a process of curating the pre-documented streets – documents of a social reality. Without specifying location or knowing the date of the original capture, the work amplifies Google’s own dismantling of time and space. Google Street View is periodically updated, fusing images from different years within the same town or city. If they have not been replaced already, the scenes will soon disappear.

These images are a compilation of fleeting moments that address the uncomfortable collision of public and private space that now characterises much of our collective lived experience. Using only small exerts from the wider images, the attention is bought to the small, often mundane things that are captured within; these things are caught in the liminal space of what was and what comes next. The subject is arguably neither the objects, people or places themselves but the relatively more abstract scaffolding through which they are discussed, located, seen and encountered. 


Artist bios

Eremaya Albrecht was born in Alice Springs / Mparntwe, Australia, and is now based between there and Melbourne / Naarm, Australia. She completed her Bachelor of Photography at Photography Studies College, Melbourne, in 2020. Through her art practice, Albrecht poetically responds to people, places and the spaces between. Using the substructure of conceptual art, alongside a personal and political viewpoint, she seeks to express the world around her. She approaches photography with intuition and emotion, utilising analogue and digital photographic techniques, and the moving image.

Jonny Rowden is a British-born performing artist based in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, NT. Since graduating from the Performance Practice Masters program at Plymouth University, UK in 2012, he has worked with UK-based artists Kaleider, Blind Ditch, The Bike Shed Theatre, Bizarre Rituals, Alice Tatton-Brown, Tom Pritchard and Steven Paige, and formed performance company AMINAL with collaborator Kelly Marie Miller. After relocating to Australia in 2015, he has worked extensively with GUTS Dance, producing and coordinating video and media components of their desert-based dance initiative, Alice Can Dance; collaborated with Alexandra Hullah in residence at Visual Bulk in Hobart, Tasmania; produced his own performance-installation work, Born & Bread, at Alice Springs Desert Festival; collaborated with several artists and Watch This Space ARI on the crossover food and performance event, The Silver Spoon; had poetry published as part of Red Dirt Poetry Festival 2020; served as dramaturg for Sara Black and Jasmin Sheppard on their work Value For Money; worked as a script developer and performer for Betty Sweetlove on her 2021 work, The Nestmakers; and is a former studio artist at Watch This Space ARI in Alice Springs, where he focused predominantly on his writing practice.

Where do Birds go to Die?

31st August—
8th September 2022
in the Pantry

Eremaya Albrecht & Jonny Rowden