Google Street Blues (english)

There's hardly anyone on the streets on Google Street View.

You wonder how they do it; in real life you get the feeling you can't be alone for thirty seconds. In any case, it's a good place to be, in this dull double of the world. You're finally alone with your memories, with your fantasies.

I'm walking on Google Street View in my old footsteps.

I retrace my route through this life – literally.

I'm paying a final visit to the places I once knew, to what will have been the backdrop of my life; today an empty backdrop, as if relegated to the storerooms of an old theatre. The silent, motionless reserves of Time.

I also reconstruct the lives and journeys of the people I meet. I try to see through their eyes.

Each itinerary is an anonymous, encrypted biography.

Just as Borgès might tell us that the Universe is itself a labyrinth, each life is a drift, à la Debord; but an involuntary and unconscious drift.

There's a light, a luminosity, almost a weather that's specific to Google Street View.

It strikes me every time.

White skies that promise no afterlife. A neutral, pale light, the true light of memory, which is neither the blinding light of a blue summer sky, nor a golden autumn twilight, but the milky light of an empty sky ready to swallow the world.

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