Keyword Intervention

2007

Keyword Intervention mined current popular search phrases from top search engines and displayed them online where they were indexed by the same search engines, thus appearing in the original search results.

Users searching for these words clicked on the Keyword Intervention site in the search engine results and were informed they had received a cultural intervention to prompt them to "investigate the imaginary line between commerce and culture." This manifestation acknowledged that the internet is a public space, where like the physical world, artists can enact dialogue by intervening in that space.

The museum installation borrows the image of a mandala to reference this appreciation of changing culture. The search phrases emanate slowly from the center of a circular form on the ground via a computer projection. It is intentionally meditative, similar to the creation of sand paintings by Buddhist monks, a religious construction acknowledging our temporary material forms.

Both manifestations operate in real time, using public space and publicly available information to construct a place of dialog through new forms.

Keyword Intervention
Keyword Intervention
Keyword Intervention
Keyword Intervention

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