jenny odell
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Everyone on Google
2009
see part two
Starting in 1970, conceptual artist Douglas Huebler embarked on a mission, wherein “throughout the remainder of the artist’s lifetime, he [would] document, to the extent of his capacity, the existence of everyone alive in order to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled in that manner.” Next to a photograph of a crowd on the street, for example, he would place the caption: “AT LEAST ONE PERSON WHO, FOR AN INSTANT AT LEAST, BECAME MORE THAN NORMALLY CONSCIOUS OF HIS, OR HER EXISTENCE.” Another crowd on a rain-slicked street he pairs with the caption, “AT LEAST ONE PERSON WHO MIGHT FEEL PLEASED TO HAVE BEEN MADE THE SUBJECT OF ART.”
The photographs have nothing in common except that they are all photographs of no one in particular—groups and crowds wandering in and out of the picture plane, with an unawareness utterly at odds with the categorical tone of the captions. That disjuncture, often humorous, calls attention to the way that photography has frozen the features into the crowd into what appears, through the photograph, to be a defining moment. It is in fact a completely arbitrary moment within a stream of equally arbitrary moments. But the image, wrested from the photographed individual, emptied of meaning, and then reinvested with another meaning through the caption, demonstrates the way in which the image and its associations (however ridiculous, such as “one person who blames everyone but himself”) begin to survive and even flourish autonomously.
Forty years later, we find this same autonomy in the celebrity sightings, emotional blog outbursts, and political forum debates that achieve a permanence, through the archiving and caching action of Google, that can be completely out of sync with their value as true statements. Anyone who has Googled her- or himself knows all too well the life that an image or an association can take on completely outside the control of that person.
For this project, I used all 122 captions—that Huebler used at various times, then compiled into a list—as search terms in Google. I used quotes so that whatever person showed up matched exactly those words; for example, “at least one person who has no point of view” ends up including Thomas Middleton (“He has no point of view”), Keanu Reeves (“‘I have no point of view on it’”), God (“strictly speaking, God has no point of view”), Jean Eustache (“‘I have no point of view, I am my point of view’”), Orcs from Lord of the Rings (“The Orcs have no point of view”), Marshall McLuhan (“‘I have no point of view’”), etc. As I accumulated the search results, which included the URL and an image (or user icon) of the person, I posted them on the wall under their respective captions/categories.
By the end of one week, I had searched all of the categories that actually had results (some, such as “one person who hears voices totally lacking in charisma,” had no results), though by no means were those categories totally exhausted. The “at least one” in all of the captions takes on a newly relevant meaning when one considers the varying credibility and anonymity of these statements, ranging from a headline that proclaims, “Scientology’s Leader, David Miscavige, is a Failure,” to a despairing “Scarlettears” who sighs on 43things.com, “My parents hate me, I am such a failure.”
see part two >
