MICHAEL THARP

About the Search Screens series

The Search Screen series, begun in 2011, are some of the first works to expand the definition of traditional photography and art into the realm of the digital screen capture.

The focus on one word – and only one word –  searches and the corresponding first page of  ‘image results’ draws attention not only to word/image denotation, but also to the redrawing of cultural and informational norms via the Internet.

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They have been described as the 21st c. equivalent of

true digital "readymades" ; split-second digital artifacts or search "time capsules", that can be replicated but never duplicated in time.

As we are now seeing develop in the 21st century, Google is the new, accepted and incredibly more transitory, repository of “knowledge”, replacing the centuries-old model of printed encyclopedias and academic or public libraries. 

Google search has become the new algorithmic arbiter of the collective Jungian archetype or Platonic ideal – complete with the heightened capitalist tension between commercial/academic and high/low-brow prisms.

The screen capture's grid presentation – elegant, simple, regimented, and organized –  belie the computative, selective, and sometimes manipulated input that now generates – and increasingly defines in a much different way — our experiences, our visual vocabularies, and shared cultural identities.