We've Moved!
Visit SDSU’s new digital collections website at https://digitalcollections.sdsu.edu
Description
Search Party is a project that investigates the Google search as existential search. In 2016, some of the top google searches in the world were; ‘how to be funny’, ‘how to be myself’, ‘how to look younger’ and ‘how to lose weight’. These queries were the starting point for this project. Their unanswerable quality led to a deeper investigation into our current relationship with digital technology and self improvement, a relationship that is heavily impacted by both marketing and psychology. As we become increasingly reliant on technology, we also become highly susceptible to the influences of marketing. Capitalistic strategies to influence what we want are being linked with systems that we ‘need’ or have come to heavily rely upon. To contextualize this reliance, we will apply Communication’s Uses and Gratifications (U & G) theory to look at the use of Google Search. This theory explains that mass media usage has a direct relationship to the fulfillment of needs (uses) and wants (gratifications) ("Uses and Gratifications...," n.d.). Each time we digitally query, we are inundated with results that blur the line between necessity and desire and thereby reinforce our participation. Search Party reimagines this relationship to web 2.0 by physicalizing a analogue version of our search queries. Utilitarian carabiner forms are the wearable vehicles for collecting all of our needs and wants in an attempt to ‘complete’ our search. The carabiner form symbolizes functionality, utility, and ubiquity and are infused with symbols of desire borrowed from products of self improvement, traditional jewelry, and luxury brand marketing. The paradoxical forces of necessity and excess are intended to parallel the aforementioned theory that the more we rely on technology, the more susceptible we become to capitalistic strategies. This exhibition is comprised of three groups of ‘jewel tools’, each addressing the acquisition of our needs and wants via Google Search. These forms are an analogue reinterpretation of the search and response cycle and are intended to slow down and spotlight interactions with technology that are unseeable. This exhibition, will be displayed in the University Gallery from April 21-May 4.
