ABSTRACT
Many of Maground’s images offer clean perspectival regression: long urban boulevards or avenues that disappear to a single vanishing point, or tight urban intersections from which streets disappear to the left and the right. In this chapter, images of mediated cityscapes and landscapes, devoid of people and vehicles, are explored as indicators of an emerging trend in automotive marketing, one that liberates the consumer from the negative or costly aspects of car ownership. Agreement borders of the European continent, the locations of the landscapes captured are ostensibly very precise, albeit removed of the exact coordinates that permit the audience to ‘visit’ them themselves. Photographic agencies commercialise their imagery through the sale of licences to use and reproduce their images. Although artists and computer game programmers have used Google Street View as the basis for new works, in so doing they intentionally break the relationship between imagery and geographical coordinates for artistic or competitive effect.
