Aram Bartholl’s Google Portrait Series
Aram Bartholl’s hand-copied QR codes are portraits for the digital age. Made from different drawing media like charcoal, ink, and edding, Bartholl has artistically rendered what is now a very familiar form of information storage. Each of these portraits is encrypted with search results for the sitter’s name; the code is in this way a portal to the subject’s digital presence. Of course, these search results are ever-changing as Bartholl’s subjects continue to add to their digital biographies while also competing with others who share their name. These portraits begin to tap into a kind of acute cultural anxiety: that we must maintain a web-based existence to verify our physical one. Bartholl writes:
“Almost everyone can be found by name on Google nowadays. Even people who never used computers can be found because their names appear in scanned books on the internet. Almost everybody has at least once googled himself. ‘Ego-surfing’ is a very popular way to see what people find out about you googling your name. In that way the first 10 entries of a Google search result page represent the modern portrait. Who is this person? In what context does the name appear? What are the top links? Are there other people with same or similar name in the results? The portrait dynamically changes over time depending on the Google algorithms, the language of the search and of course by the activities of the person. Due to the omnipresence of Google people often care very much about their Google portrait and sometimes even hire specialized services to have the result page altered ‘actively’.”
Naturally, Bartholl makes sure to underscore the narcissism inherent in the act of Googling oneself by including a self-portrait in the series.
For more of Bartholl’s work — including his incredible Map work and a recent curatorial project called Offline Art — see his website here.
