Like many first-time Street View users, Kinsley and Hewlett, then roommates, typed in their address and found their house. Kinsley and Hewlett soon found themselves discussing surveillance and virtual reality, and began considering how they might explore those issues and Street View through art.

"But instead of dwelling on the darker undertones of these issues, we began to think about ways of playing with the system," Kinsley said in an e-mail interview from Iceland, where he is participating in an artist residency. The "Street With a View" project was his master of fine arts thesis project at Carnegie Mellon University.

"We were interested in interjecting something staged, something fictional, into Street View and playing with - and subtly questioning - the notion of reality in something that we perceive as a factual representation of our world," said Kinsley, 26.