Google maps captures art in action

Anyone using Google's Street View map feature to scan one downtown Pittsburgh street is bound to do a double-take. Two 17th century swordsmen doing battle? An escape from a building using knotted sheets?

Google really did capture those scenes when it sent a car equipped with cameras down Pittsburgh's Sampsonia Way to take photographs for its online maps. But these images and most of the other scenes caught on Sampsonia were staged by artists Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett.

The project was Kinsley's master of fine arts thesis project at Carnegie Mellon University.Kinsley and Hewlett found themselves exploring surveillance, virtual reality and Street View through art. "We were interested in ... playing with -- and subtly questioning -- the notion of reality in something that we perceive as a factual representation of our world," said Kinsley.