Argentea Gallery, 2017
Argentea Gallery, 2017
Text Trends looks at our perception of words and data when displayed in graphical form.
The series Text Trends is a statistical comparison of Google searches for pairs of words, from 2004 to the present. The self-referential nature of the relationships between the chosen words (winter/summer, buy/sell, etc.) and the fierce humour that emerges from them, reflect the expectations embodied in these statistics: they represent actual searches of users. Something that might be taken as a single measurement reveals itself to be also an oracle, whose performativity determines our behaviour.
Text Trends deals with the spectacularization of information. Using Google data it explores the vast search data of its users. The animation takes the content generated by search queries and reduces this process to its essential elements: search terms vs. frequency searched for over time, presented in the form of a line graph.
The viewer watches the animation plot out the ebb and flow of a series of search terms generated over the last four years by internet users around the world. Pairs of words such as ‘now and later’, ‘summer and winter’ play out matter-of-factly, with all the passion of a market index. Instead of the hyper-interactivity of emerging news aggregators and information readers, Text Trends explores our perception of words though topics like time and politics. The work is an investigation into data use, encouraging criticism on how the data is generated; prompting the question what does the data actually represent?
Data on View, La Terrasse Nanterre, 2016
