“blogger skins”

“Online presence” used to be a public relations catch phrase. In the last 3 years this strange concept revealed its very real powers. Google based searches became official introductions, performed shortly after, if not before, the actual handshake.

We have entered the era of identity superstructures: complex sets of search engine outcomes based on our activities, popularity, name itself, purposeful efforts and a whole bunch of random data fluctuation. We are growing second skins, made out of words, links and images: exciting, addictive and sometimes completely meaningless.

“blogger skins” is a project based on time-specific capturing of image Google searches.

The community most sensitive to this new phenomenon, and par excellence conceptually most related, is the world of pro-bloggers. For this project I chose five art bloggers: Tom Moody (http://tommoody.us/), Paddy Johnson (http://artfagcity.com/), Régine Debatty (http://we-make-money-not-art.com/), James Wagner (http://jameswagner.com/) and Joy Garnett (http://newsgrist.typepad.com/) and performed specific image searches on their names. The thumbnails of first 100 images were imported (in the order of appearance) into an HTML editor and compiled into an image map, reflecting the original Google layout and popularity of search items.

The mosaic-like products are super-portraits of bloggers, reflecting not necessarily who they are as human beings, but how the Internet “sees” them.

Special thanks to Paul Slocum, who made me realize that, the only way to reference nonlinearity is through capturing its linear representation.

“blogger skins” premiered in September 2007 at artMovingProjects is Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Marcin Ramocki, 2007