Joshua Noiseux is an Ontario-born photographer currently living in Montreal. Drawing from the traditions of landscape photography and reportage, Noiseux’s works express a keen interest in idiosyncratic spaces, structures and processes of human culture. For the past four years his art practice has confronted the constructed nature and unreality of the photograph. His most recent body of work extracts and re-appropriates images from Google Street View to further address the photograph’s peculiar remove from reality. These images draw attention to Google’s pervasive monopoly of virtual space, and how its technologies are reshaping our encounters with the “real world.” His piece entitled The Response is one such image culled from Google Street View. The Response is inspired by the difference Noiseux observed between the physical experience of the National War Memorial in Ottawa and his digital encounter with the monument in Street View. Noiseux attempts to de-monumentalize the memorial by highlighting its ordinariness and obscurity in Google’s digital version of the world – an indiscriminate amalgamation of images that does not necessarily confer importance on cultural markers of place.

Stephanie D’Amico