Albertine Meunier: My Google Search History
Title:
- My Google Search History
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
- ISEA2020: 26th International Symposium on Electronic Art
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More artworks from ISEA2020:
Creation Year:
- 2006 - 2016
Medium:
- Two printed books & web page
Artist Statement:
My Google Search History raises several questions about our use of search engines: what traces and what archives are we producing without even noticing? Incidentally, how do we reintegrate these automatically generated archives into our own experience and make these recordings, that were designed by and for machines, intelligible to human users?
Google systematically records its users’ queries, and in this sense, the ‘history’ it offers is already an archive of this monitoring: Albertine Meunier’s self-reflexive remediation acts as a reminder. This gesture of repetition allows the deployment of a critical (but also playful) thought on the collection of our data.
My Google Search History comes in two volumes, published five years apart, one in 2011 and the other in 2016. Albertine Meunier presents, in book form, her browsing history on the Google search engine, like an extimate, rather than intimate, diary of her successive queries. The data is subject to minimal editing work, punctuated only with eccentric titles and extraction dates. In addition to the books, the project has also given rise to filmed performances in which the data is recited like a long glossolalic poem.
