Autosuggest ABC 2013

This playful work, comprises of 26 wooden alphabet blocks, each representing a letter of the alphabet. An experiment was carried out through the course of the first 2 months of 2013, starting on te 1st of January, where each letter of the alphabet was typed into the Google images search box. The top 5 suggestions (based on popular search terms) from each letter were taken from the drop down list, and an image from the first page of the word’s search result page is painted on the sides of the block with the corresponding letter.

The work thus acts as a snapshot of the zeitgeist of contemporary society, and of the things, people, places, brands and issues which the majority of society finds most “searchworthy”. It takes these entities, that anyone would find faintly familiar, and the images that children grow up with, and preserves them in oil paint and layers of varnish, and presents them as toy to be played with, to be explored, browsed, thrown around and closely inspected. I am not presenting the viewer with what I want them to see, but rather giving them exactly what they want to see.