So a few times over the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen cars driving down the streets of San Francisco with 8 digital SLR cameras attached to the roofs, for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why they would be just taking photos of the street.
Well, I’m positing that with the cameras facing out, it’s the work of Google, digitizing the “Street Views” of The City for their Google Maps application.
It’s incredible, I just needed to look up my friend’s zip code and typed in his address, and then I was given the option to check out the street view. This is especially useful if you’re on foot and don’t have GPS, you can actually *visualize* the place you’re headed to.
Pete Ippel, the son of a dancer and a musician, was born in Oak Park, Illinois and has been surrounded by the arts since birth. He moved to Morris, Illinois in 1989 and started to participate in athletics rather than dance. After high school, Pete attended Cornell University where he received a BA in psychology and a BFA in photo / digital art making. He continued to follow his sporting dreams in the high jump, which culminated in a school record leap of 7 feet 1/2 inch in 2001.
In May 2004 he attained an MFA degree in the New Genres department of the San Francisco Art Institute. Presently Pete is a practicing artist whose work is in numerous private collections and has been exhibited in New York, California, and internationally.
Mr. Ippel resides in Working Artists Ventura, a sustainable artist community in southern California. In addition, he teaches art, is a web developer, an active blogger, and still high jumps from time to time.
As a passionate problem solver and a pragmatic optimist, Pete’s art and his life are full of exciting challenges.
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