a side view of a yellow car, is a tiny artistic web project I started in February 2025 in the context of the Welcome to My Homepage Residency, an international online residency program hosted by The Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, TX (USA).
The aim is to experiment and toy with accessibility features such as alt text, audio transcription, but also low-tech media loaders designed for people with low-connectivity internet.
The end of residency project is this intimate one-page website that features pictures of yellow cars alongside personnal reflections on digital imagery in the age of self-driving cars.
The website implements multiple accessibility features : An image loader that displays pixelised images by default with an added grainy aesthetic, A contextualized audio transcription of the page, and alt text for all images written in 5-7-5 short poem format.
I've always lived in urban areas, sometimes in and sometimes outside of the city ring. The ring is a motorway that doesn't go into details it just goes all the way round. Once I even lived right by it, like, I could see it from my window. It made a lot of noise. People honking at 6 in the morning would often wake me up, but in the evening the low drone sound was soothing to fall asleep to.
I live somewhere quieter now, away from the large avenues and the two way crossings. Here the cars are much different, they are well behaved, all aligned and sit in silence. I like the yellow ones in particular, they feel special to me. I wonder what sound they make, probably the same as any other, but it's amusing to picture a yellow sound for them. So I've been taking pictures of them.
I still don't have a driving license myself, mostly because I live in a European city but also because I was promised flying & self-driving cars in a science magazine when I was 6. But now that I see who is running the world and its technology, I dont' want to drive anymore. I don't want the self-driving cars, and I don't want the flying ones either.
Instead, I'd rather take the long trains and the long walks, taking picture of the special yellow cars on the way and maybe deflate a few SUVs in a rich neighborhood.
I decided to take these as side views. I've tried different compositions but the following is my favorite : one third of ground and two thirds of building, with the car sandwiched in between. Trying to align these roughly made me realise how terrible we are at parking cars.
As a kid, I had a tape player with the audio book "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" playing on loop. In it, Ford, an alien, comes to Earth and mistakes cars as the principal life form of the planet. Upon arrival he tries to shake hands with a car and almost dies in an accident as a result of trying to communicate with one.
It is of course, comical, but is it that odd for an alien to wonder if cars are the dominant species of planet earth ? I'm from earth and sometimes I look deep into a car's eyes and I see a very expressive face. My friend Tom who is a designer told me this effect has a name, it is called Pareidolia. He says it is a design motive to make technology appear more human-like and friendlier.
I look into the parked car's eye, and from it's side view, it looks back at me through the corner of it's eye. As this happens, I wonder how many captcha's I have filled in my life. I've clicked on the bridges, on bikes, on the traffic lights. I wonder how many self-driving cars they have trained with my data.
You'd think that cars are becoming more and more human-like, since we design them with pretty faces, and since we train them like we train our children to traffic regulations. But is being human all about stopping at a red light ? Is it about being good at recognizing what is a bike, what is a bridge and what is not ?
I think it might be us who are becoming cars.
I sometimes forget myself in Google Street View. I click endlessly until I'm at the edges of the country. In this moment I wonder where I am. Am I still behind my computer or am I in the Google car ? Who is driving if it isn't me ? Could I be the car ? If I am I hope to be yellow an my pronouns are now it.
Recently Ive been fascinated at how good some people are at GeoGuessr. GeoGuessr is a game that uses Google Street View images and prompts players to find the localization. The contestants can use any part of the image to guess where they are. They can use typography, street signs, architectural patterns, but also extra-diegetic information such as the resolution of the image, glitches, image grain patterns and Google Car artifacts.
It makes you think. How much information lies in a single picture. When I started posting yellow cars, I wondered if people could guess where I lived by cross-referencing all of localizations and calculating the average location. It's odd to think that it is possible
There is more to these pictures than yellow cars. They tell another story. One about where I live and when I took them. Analyzing them thoroughly, you can probably also tell how tall I am and what brand and model my phone is. You could guess my patterns, which supermarket I go to, where I go to work and where I go on holiday. Each of these picture encodes a part of this. A part of me.
A picture is revealing, even a simple one. It reveals more about me than I let myself believe.