Search Engine Art: Internet Imperialism and the image in context

Compare the image search results for “boy crawling” and “girl crawling.” In the first you see cute babies, in the second you see scantily clad women in seductive poses. Similarly compare “boy at work” with “girl at work” or “school boy” with “school girl.” This sexist representation of women is a result of Google’s extremely profitable revenue model. Conduct an image search (images.google.com) for “Amazon.” Do the same for “Cherokee.” The results, dominated by the ecommerce company and the car brand respectively, tell us something important about how the internet works and who is more likely to benefit: companies over communities and products over people. Not only is the current Internet unequal but artificial intelligence is programmatically encoding this discrimination into our future. Artificial intelligence uses large data set, such as all the images of “girls” on the internet, and learns to label future images based on common characteristics found in the initial data set. Machines are learning that girls are sexualized women while they are learning that boys are young male children. We don’t know the full impact of AI, but it is already being built into technology we trust and depend on. It may not equally respect us all. Internet Imperialism is Search Engine Artist Gretchen Andrew’s method of intentionally structuring information dominate the online definition or reputation of a place or idea. It is a central part of her art practice through which she manipulates search results, swapping existing image results for her paintings. In doing so, she creates a less product-focused Internet that encourages discussion about how the internet could better come to reflect the human complexity we see IRL (in real life). This paper discusses these topics and shares examples of past & ongoing artworks including sharing of the artist's method of Internet Imperialism.

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Gretchen Andrew

Conference

Publication date: July 2018

Publication date (Print): July 2018

Pages: 92-95

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[0001]Los Angeles, California

USA

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EVA2018.17

SO-VID: 8635f297-1d16-492e-91f5-edd7a9c4a6e9

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

Conference acronym: EVA

Conference number:

Conference location: London, UK

Conference date: 9 - 13 July 2018

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

Product

1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EVA2018.17

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

G. Andrew 2017 Implications of AI Art, Architecture and AI institutionCambridge University March
G. Andrew 2018a Art and the Education of Intelligent Machines Wikimedia Commons RFC
G. Andrew 2018b Google Makes the Internet Sexist. (To appear.)

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[1] G. Andrew 2017 Implications of AI Art, Architecture and AI institutionCambridge University March

[2] G. Andrew 2018a Art and the Education of Intelligent Machines Wikimedia Commons RFC

[3] G. Andrew 2018b Google Makes the Internet Sexist. (To appear.)