MY GOOGLE SEARCH HISTORY - ALBERTINE MEUNIER

There’s already quite a tradition of artists exposing their own private data as a performative gesture. Since the second wave of net.art till now different examples of voluntary self-exposure can be found, with an undeniable emotional impact to the audience. Albertine Meunier falls into this tradition with My Google Search History, having carefully retained since 2006 her “Web Search History” on Google, publishing it online a few years after. The chronology of keywords can be downloaded, searched, read and sequentially listened through a webpage. Finally Meunier decided to print it also as a physical book definitively reinforcing the initial concept. In fact, it can be conceptually considered similarly to a personal series of tweets or of Facebook posts: it’s a digital personal diary in its own linguistic form. This specific form is a sequence of words and short sentences, sometimes totally unrelated, sometimes consequential, and it gives the whole text an intrinsic poetic quality. Overall it tells about the artist and her sudden interests and needs in time, so the reader is invited to be a voyeur, and becomes twice guilty as technically this data is not meant to be shared, because it’s violating Google license agreement. The diary, in all its declinations including the offline printed one, becomes then a liberated data portrait.

Albertine Meunier has been practicing so-called digital art since 1998, and is particularly inclined to use the Internet as raw material. She defines herself as a Net artist. Her works question, both critically and playfully, big online players such as Google, Twitter and Facebook, as well as our new environment full of transistors and microprocessors, where we live at the speed of fiber optic networks. As such, her favourite themes are: aesthetics of the Internet, materiality and materialization of the Internet, but also the endless accumulation that results from the digital format.
https://www.albertinemeunier.net/albertine_meunier_bio.htm