Searching Series

This series is an ongoing body of work, that draws on notions of portraiture, of the found object/text recontextualised and of the ambiguities between public and private
In July, 2006, America Online (AOL), controversially released the private search histories of thousands of their subscribers.

I became fascinated by the ways in which these subscribers were consulting the internet as though it were some kind of oracle that could offer solutions
for everything from an infestation of fruit flies to the cure for loneliness.

How many of us realize that every fleeting thought, question, impulse or desire that we enter into a search engine is logged, recorded or analyzed,
from the mundane search for a local store’s address to the many ways one can commit suicide.

The internet seems so ephemeral and anonymous, but we leave traces there just as surely as we leave footprints on a path. 
The traces we leave become a portrait of that most ephemeral thing of all: our minds and their fears, questions and desires.