The Google Street View car is like the ultimate street photographer, a robo Cartier-Bresson methodically scouring the streets and documenting what it sees. But most people use GSV for practical purposes, and they view any drama or comedy captured by the roving 360-degree camera as accidents.

A few photographers are now looking for these 'accidents' intentionally. Instead of walking out on the street to find interesting scenes and people, they are simply curating the pre-documented streets from the comfort of their desk at home.

Michael Wolf, for example, uses a camera to photograph scenes from Google Street View open on his computer's browser. In February, his honorable mention in the Contemporary Issues category at the World Press Photo Awards for A Series of Unfortunate Events ignited a storm of debate. Some balked at the idea that Wolf's project was photojournalism, while others embraced the decision and called for more conceptual leaps and redefinitions of photojournalism in the digital age.

Wolf is not the first to employ an office-chair appreciation of the Google world. Before and since other photographers and artists have developed projects riffing on GSV and Google Earth. Read on for a collection of the most interesting projects with statements from their makers.

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Wolf's first project with GSV was a compilation of fleeting moments of no particular location: People flipping the bird, actual birds in mid-flight blocking our view, dismembered shadows, a crouched woman urinating behind a car and so on.

A former photojournalist, Wolf found many of the scenes in his early series on GSV forums such as Google Sightseeing and GoogleStreetFunny. With later series, all his finds were his own.

"It's a real file that I have, I'm not taking a screenshot," he told The British Journal of Photography. "I move the camera forward and backward in order to make an exact crop, and that's what makes it my picture. It doesn't belong to Google, because I'm interpreting Google; I'm appropriating Google."

Without specifying location or knowing the date of the original capture, A Series of Unfortunate Events amplifies Google's own dismantling of time and space. Google will update GSV, periodically fusing images from different years within the same town or city. If they have not been replaced already, the scenes from Wolf's browser will soon disappear from Google's world.

"I think its extremely interesting what artists are doing with Google Street View, Google Earth, GPS and Twitter," says Wolf. "It's one of the important functions of art, to interpret contemporary issues."

Top photo: Image #7 from A Series of Unfortunate Events by Michael Wolf.

Bottom photo: Image #50 from A Series of Unfortunate Events by Michael Wolf.