De Geuzen: Global Anxiety Monitor (2007)

Distributed by the Netherlands Media Art Institute
http://catalogue.nimk.nl/site/art.php?id=14731
http://www.geuzen.org/anxiety

Anxiety strongly influences people's attitudes towards life and defines their short- and long-term behavior and views. It is traditionally used as a guiding principle in political discourse. This has especially been the case since September 11, 2001, when various risk-inducing global themes and phenomena, from terrorism to transmittable diseases, increasingly began to influence the attitudes and policies of Western governments in many areas, from immigration to relations with the Middle East.

The Global Anxiety Monitor by De Geuzen is a project that offers an artistic perspective upon, and analysis of, anxiety in an international context, through the analysis of images. In many of their works, artist collective De Geuzen explore mediatized images, especially in the ecology of the world wide web, where images appear in an ever-changing and dynamic context and where it is possible to research and visualize the way their influence and meaning fluctuate.

Presented as a multi-screen installation, the Global Anxiety Monitor simultaneously presents various live Google image searches in different languages, including Arabic, Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Querying anxiety buzzwords such as terrorism, conflict, financial crisis and climate change, each language delivers its own unique set of results. The various screens of the installation show a continuous pulse of visuals and metadata: perspectives from different languages sometimes converge and occasionally conflict. By continually performing timed searches, it becomes evident that query is driven by cultural biases and fed by local concerns. The Global Anxiety Monitor does not archive or document these processes, but rather it is a means of exposing the various Google worlds we may occupy at any given moment.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• geuzen
• global
• anxiety
• monitor
• google
• image
• search
• media
• art
• net.art
• net
• internet