Models

programming of the der LED visualization: IOhannes m zmölnig
print grafic design and illustration: Elisabeth Kopf
a project by Art in Public Space NÖ

Have you googled today?
Ever notice that whenever you do a search, all the little machines that generate your search results tremendously influence your perception of the world and your decisions and that you leave behind your own profile each time and help to compile the perfect user profile for free?

Being on the Internet, being online, not only means participating in the great illusion machine, watching a world machine, it also means creating it, leaving tracks, writing it, restructuring processes. A lot of people surfing the web are not aware of the fact that this happens constantly and often in not so obvious ways. As soon as we are out there, we participate in rankings, influence which news is covered, are analyzed as consumers, and become part of future strategies of every kind. We submit our profiles, and every click to every link is documented.

Countless robots, or algorithms, process massive amounts of user data to provide seemingly objective search results in the form of lists with links to websites. Not only our geographical locations or various country-specific filtering settings but above all user profiles are what produce a perception of the world with no rough edges, a model generated by robots using available data. They seem to know what we find good or interesting. No wrinkles, no blackheads, everything is optimized, the rest is eliminated, does not show up in the list.

Profiles, the contours of our behavior have become a powerful artifact. But they are more than that; they are also the superficial relicts of our egos.

Where does the data come from?
Visitors of the Lower Austrian state exhibition at the Kulturfabrik Hainburg are invited to poke their heads into the Insight tower - A World Machine. Here they can experience what goes on behind the scenes of a Google search request. In the process, the profiles of the visitors are photographed and serve as the source material for the installation.