Elena Chergilanova

Still Life © Google 2025 is a collection of screenshots of deceased individuals discovered on Google Street View. These ghostly appearances suggest that the so-called “Other Side” may now reside not in spiritual dimensions, but in digitally mapped purgatories, where memory, data, and ghosts converge. Here, our loved ones are not fully gone; they occupy a digital heterotopia (1), both real and unreal, public and personal, functional and poetic, a mirror of reality that lags behind – showing people who are gone, places that have changed, moments that can never be revisited, embedded in a world that has already moved on. It is the ultimate non-place (2): a flattened, hyperreal, always-in-transit cartography where any location is reduced to a waystation. However, the accidental emotional depth that death has imbued these images with breaks open the non-place and forces it to hold memory, mourning, and nostalgia – things it was never designed for. The emotional impact comes from this very contradiction: an impersonal, data-driven system becomes an accidental cemetery of gestures. A neutral but omnipresent eye that maps without care and sees without knowing, a ghost machine that constantly traverses, scans, and updates while unknowingly archiving what time has erased.