Hervisions is delighted to present #AccordingToTheInternet, with search-engine artist Gretchen Andrew discussing her project on the internet’s authority and its mode of re/defining.
Gretchen’s practice considers the way the internet has favoured “companies over communities and products over people”, and highlights the limitations of how the internet thinks. Through the system of search engines, Amazon has come to mean a company before a river; Citizen, a watch before an individual. During the discussion, Gretchen will examine the possibility of artists working with the internet to begin restructuring its systems, in a way that redefines user-experience and mindfulness.
Gretchen will be in conversation with fellow artist and theorist Emily Simpson, who’s moving image work overlaps with Gretchen on the topics of digital culture, feminism, online identity, and search engines. Emily will be discussing her work everything i’ve searched for, 2018, a narrated diary guided by her Google-documented search queries. In it, Simpson links a curated selection of her past searches into a confessional performance while exploring how the factual data about our lives confuses our memories and sense of self.
#AccordingToTheInternet is Gretchen Andrew’s ongoing investigation into the internet’s authority and its mode of defining. Through it, she explores ways in which we trust and depend on the internet while exposing the ways it can be manipulated through Internet Imperialism and Search Engine Art interventions.