Google and the Society of the Query. Digital Aesthetics and Detournements
p. 160-172
Texte intégral
1“The hypermodern age is contemporary with an absolute inflation of screens,” Lipovestsky and Serroy observed in 2007, adding that “never before have humans used so many screens not only to look out onto the world, but to live their own lives.”1 What does the very general expression “living one’s own life” encompass? Broadly speaking, it includes our modes of perception, experience, and knowledge. Today, we discover the world on or through our screens. In this regard, Google’s search engine has established itself as the key interface for all our queries and searches and even our processes of discovery.
2According to the website Netmarketshare, in January 2017, Google claimed nearly 78 % of all online queries. Yahoo stood at 6.4 %, Bing at almost 8 %, and Baidu, the Chinese search engine, at 6.37 %. 78 % of all queries is the equivalent of over four and a half billion searches a day. This points to a real stranglehold on our queries, as if they all passed through the eye of Google’s needle. Ironically, we might say that if billions of queries can be sent through this simple horizontal opening, a camel may well pass through the eye of a needle - Biblical metaphors do sometimes come in handy. These queries, submitted from the comfort of a work or living space, allow us to travel the world not only semiotically - through the texts and images populating the webpages we visit - but also physically and materially. Each query involves us in about 2,000 kilometers of back-and-forths between the various relays and data centers, sending requests to 1,000 computers in 0.2 seconds and consuming the equivalent of 17 seconds of a 60- watt lightbulb.
3We are increasingly living in “a society of the query,” to borrow Geert Lovink’s term: a society based, as he puts it, on the “Googlization of our lives,” that is, on the company’s dominance over numerous spheres of our lives, both online and offline. Quite simply, “search is the way we now live”2; it is at the core of an economy of attention. Indeed, “Google’s vision is of an Internet that is ‘everyware, ’” a distinctive feature of “the age of ubiquitous IT, everywhere present because computers - or at least machines appearing as such - are no longer needed.”3
4Whatever the query, Google’s search engine will gladly find a series of answers in the form of hyperlinks to some website or webpage. The Mountain View company has even developed an update for cellphone searches that provides results before the question has been completed.4 And yet, as Martina Mahnke and Emma Uprichard ask, “how can a search engine know what we do not know and may not want to know?”5
5This update is presented by Google as a major breakthrough in the acceleration of database searching, but it jams users’ cognitive processes by considering those processes already predicted and factored in. We don’t really know what we want yet, but the results are already displayed and the bet is that they match our needs. Geert Lovink, following Joseph Weizenbaum, makes it explicit: “The problem of the Internet […] is that it invites us to see it as a Delphic oracle. The Internet will provide the answer to all our questions and problems. But the Internet is not a vending machine in which you throw a coin and then get what you want.”6 It is not an innocent machine; it is a machine that remembers and anticipates our needs. It is an artifact “holding the world by its thoughts.”7 The very idea of an oracle says it all: the queries do not so much involve a process of discovery, with its errors and approximations, as a process of knowledge by revelation and fascination.8 We enter text into a search field and ready-made, prearranged, predigested answers appear. What was the logic governing the sequence of the results? What value should we attach to the results, obtained quasi-instantaneously?9 The algorithms are kept secret. The black box is sealed. And it makes us less and less daring, subjected as we are to the tyranny of complex and hidden calculations. Stéphane Dagoutin points this out through the use of a metaphor in a journal entry called “Les sirènes de l’omniscience” [The Sirens of Omniscience]:
The danger of a shortcut is to lead us too rapidly to the destination. If the answer to any question is instantaneously accessible, it becomes useless to look for an answer by oneself, and hence to think. Under these circumstances, speculative thought loses its raison d’être. […] The victims of the Internet are people who will not have had the strength to resist the sirens of omniscience. Incapable of leaving the smallest detail unknown, they will no longer know how to generalize an idea.10
6The various resources and software released by Google alter the way we encounter and interact with online data. And we are only just beginning to grasp the transformations at stake. The companies deployed by Google are sprawling; they affect a growing number of aspects of our daily lives, especially our semiotic activity. Google Maps, Google Street View, Google Images, Ngram Viewer, and so on all deal with the representations through which we come to know the world and interact with our peers, both past and present.
Fig. 1: “G is for Google,” screenshot, https://abc.xyz/, 2017.

7The impact of these resources is cognitive and symbolic. We are at the height of the digital revolution. But it is important, as Stéphane Vial reminds us, to understand “what the digital revolution is the revolution of. Like all previous technological revolutions, it is a phenomenological revolution, that is, a revolution of perception: it disrupts how we habitually perceive matter and, correlatively, our very idea of reality.”11
8In fact, with the quite recent creation of Alphabet, Google is not merely aiming to occupy the symbolic space of cyberspace, it does not simply want to be at the center of our searches of available data, it also wants to appropriate the code that is used, looking to create the very alphabet with which those searches are formulated. A similar desire for omnipotence would be laughable were it featured in a bad science-fiction movie - like the doctor behind the nuclear plot in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove - but instead it has people grinding their teeth. With Google becoming Alphabet, it is as if Gutenberg, not content with developing a viable model of the printing press, after fifteen years of his invention’s phenomenal success, set out to reinvent the alphabet itself, and not merely the material dimension of its parts. As Larry Page says on the company’s homepage:
For Sergey [Sergey Brin] and me this is a very exciting new chapter in the life of Google – the birth of Alphabet. We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index Google search!12
9In fact, Sergey and Larry (note, by the way, the use of first names, the sign of a curated familiarity) do not intend to stop at the alphabet - whose invention they celebrate, no less! - but rather to explore a vast array of projects and products designed to renew our experience of the world. Some will say that the creation of Alphabet is no more than a market-capitalization strategy; and yet the company’s projects are gargantuan. Each of the alphabet’s letters stands for at least one of the company’s projects. More precisely, over 78 projects are pooled together here, ranging from YouTube to Nest, from Boston Dynamics (specializing in robotics) to Android, Books, and so on. All aspects of our existence will soon be reshaped by one of Alphabet’s companies, its grip on us all the stronger because hidden beneath a good-natured exterior. The whole art of doublespeak, as Georges Orwell defines it in his dystopia 1984, consists in passing off one’s ambitions as childlike desires. Google’s persona, the mask the company likes to wear, is indeed that of a young, naïve, and enthusiastic child. The first advertisements announcing Alphabet’s creation as well as the company’s current homepage itself play on the childish nature of the project. They show wooden blocks with letters and numbers - traditional, innocent children’s blocks. The alphabet is at the heart of the process of learning written language; it is the first subject taught in elementary school. The strategy is almost perverse. How could we be suspicious of a company posing as a child, aligning its corporate image with childish imagery? If Alphabet wants to reinvent the world, it intends to start in early childhood, as a way of saying that all will be recast anew - a strategy not devoid of risks.
Digital Aesthetics: a logic of detournement
10It comes as no surprise that negative reactions to Google/ Alphabet’s hegemony have been growing, with artists and creators attempting to appropriate and misappropriate Google’s engines and applications. These attempts fall within what Lev Manovich calls info-aesthetics, which we are here calling digital aesthetics.13 For Manovich, these new aesthetics, centered in databases and the possibilities they create, have imposed themselves as a key cultural category. The idea, as Geert Lovink puts it, is “to invent new ways to interact with information, new ways to represent it, and new ways to make sense of it.”14
11These digital aesthetics are not all convergent or positive; they are also reactive and divergent. While their initial form is that of a dynamic relationship between databases and the visualization of information, which paves the way to new symbolic forms of great breadth and complexity,15 they also open other, secondary paths by shedding critical light on the limitations of digital technology and on its principal databases. These initiatives thus operate appropriations or detournements of digital platforms or software.
12Rather than underscore the power of the digital as a type of media, they reveal the omnipotence of the handful of companies that control its fate. In this context, Google figures as a prime target on numerous grounds (we will focus below on the issue of the query as such). But the target of these detournements is not only the use of images and the principle of absolute visibility promoted by Google Image, but also the representation and demarcation of the world by Google Street View, Google Earth, and their many byproducts. Like Google Arts and Culture, Google Books, with its project to build a veritable library of Babel, has also led to detournements. Not a single aspect of what defines us is overlooked, as if Alphabet was the title of one of Isaac Asimov’s science-fiction series.
13There have been many detournements of Google in the past years, many of which attempt to place the internet user in a situation of defamiliarization vis-à-vis the search engine. Since 2008, a project like Constant Dullaart’s “The Internet says No”16 has displayed an emulation of Google’s standard homepage, except that the screen moves from left to right as if shaking its head no. The search engine is functional, the presentation of search results respects Google’s parameters in every way, but the screen continues to oscillate, making the webpage difficult to use.
14Let me Google that for you,17 a project launched in 2009, seems to be an entirely superfluous tutorial since it reproduces for users the steps of their query on a search engine. We enter a term, press search, and the artwork presents us with each of the steps of the search. The filmed sequence ends with the ironic question: “Will you manage without us the next time?” The irony only serves to emphasize the lesson of the demonstration, that is, the unsettling ease with which we use these search engines while knowing nothing about how they function. For René Köning and Miriam Rasch,
Just as we don’t really know where the water from our taps and the electricity from our plugs come from, and hardly notice the street until it is cut off, we usually do not have much insight into the functionality of web search. It is a black-boxed technology, which means operating a search engine doesn’t really require any further knowledge of the technology itself.18
15This situation makes us vulnerable to all sorts of manipulations whose ins and outs we are unable to grasp. What is the status of our queries? Does Google have the right to record the traces of our searches, to analyze and use them to hone its knowledge of our search behavior and habits? In his 2006 project Those that will die,19 Gregory Chatonsky was already reflecting on the status of all the information we gratuitously hand over to the big corporations of Web 2.0, ironically repurposing the declaration made by gladiators to the emperor before they entered combat.
16A project such as My Google Search History, Jan 07, 2011 – Nov 06, 2006, by Albertine Meunier (Catherine Ramus’ pseudonym),20 explores the ambiguous relationship to the traces we leave behind in our searches. The book contains the list of her queries collected under amusing titles such as “Breaking in the turnstile” and “Space-time uncertainty.” Presented without commentary, the lists make one’s head spin. As the artist says:
Our digital lives are leaving more and more traces of our activity. Each moment spent online is guided not only by information on websites but also by search engines, and each search leaves a small invisible trace on the Internet, like a useless gesture. Day after day, we repeat this practice: the same gestures, the same reflexes, the same habits. These repetitions create the invisible tracks of each individual’s online itinerary. […]
In 2006, Google launched the Web Search History function and began saving users’ search criteria. Since that very first day, Albertine Meunier has been scrupulously compiling her Google searches and publishing them online.21
17The lists of search terms resemble the work of a Little Poucet, allowing us to track her peregrinations through the meandering network. Each term is a query, the potential activation of a hyperlink, and, ultimately, the exploration of a webpage. There is something like an attempt at data exhaustion at work, which leads Etienne Gatti to remark that “My Google Search History conveys the time of a Society of the Query in which the speed of the flow of information accelerates our perception of time. Here, the flow is materialized.”22 This flow may be materialized, but it is rendered ineffective, as if neutralized by its being flattened on the pages of a book, a project of backwards remediation that drains the functionality from what is in all other respects an all-powerful engine. My Google Search History is not a secret history but a story in excess, a narrative reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories, as if it were possible to remember everything, including the most futile queries.
Fig. 2: Albertine Meunier: Les Dessous de L.H.O.O.Q., 2013. Screenshot.

18Following a similar logic of resistance to Google’s hegemony, Albertine Meunier has created a project called Les Dessous de L.H.O. ou l’incontestable manque de culture de Google pour l’art! [The Innards of L.H.O. or Google’s undeniable lack of art culture!]. She produced a “Ready-Made Hack” from the ready-made Marcel Duchamp invented by drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa, hijacking Leonardo da Vinci’s painting. “In turn, Albertine adds the Net Art label to Google’s search results for Duchamp’s
19L.H.O.O.Q. by directly modifying the information in Google’s Knowledge Graph. Albertine Meunier thereby shows the fragility of the access to knowledge proposed by Google.”23 Even if only fleetingly, she shows that it is possible to get behind the scenes and throw some sand in the gears. As with Duchamp’s ready-mades, the effectiveness of her project does not have to be proved immediately but in the long run.
Google poetics
20Google’s auto-complete software has been the target of many detournement projects because of its systematicity and the alienation that it produces. When a machine knows what we want better than we do, when an algorithm determines what we are trying to say before we have even had the time to think it, certain forms of our subjectivity are threatened. We are no longer singularities but mere representatives of a group whose values, expectations, and desires can be defined. In this context, it is vital to revolt by shedding light on the absurdity of the situation.
21A project such as Google Feud, halfway between Google and the American gameshow Family Feud, lets users make a game of anticipating the answers suggested by the autocomplete software. Four categories are given: culture, celebrities, names, and questions; the point is to guess, in order of appearance, the autocomplete inputs suggested by Google. Values are attached to the answers so that it is possible to keep score, to play against others, and most important to experience for oneself the often meaningless or nonsensical nature of the results. If the autocomplete function is a manifestation of the intelligent web, one may doubt the credibility of an intelligence based on a fundamentally celebrity-obsessed and impressionistic encyclopedia. In a similar vein, Google Image Quiz24 displays a photo or an image and asks us to guess the term that initiated the query. There are many elements of surprise, the connections between the terms and pictures often being strange or absurd. In “Algorithming the Algorithm,” Martina Mahnke and Emma Uprichard address the carnivalesque nature of both the playful detournements of the search engine and the algorithms used for searches and word completion:
In itself, the autocomplete algorithm may be seen as a Golem, following Collins and Pinch’s logic [in their 1998 essay The Golem: What You Should Know about Science]. A mythological creature. A bit daft. Silly. Playful. Not good or bad. Just searching. Waiting for instructions on what to search for. In turn, therefore, we suggest that we can put Google’s search algorithm to frivolous use to disrupt and disturb the ordinary words that inscribe and shape our world. Using Google’s autocomplete to resist and confuse. After all, for every “search,” there needs to be a “find” to discover something that may or may not have been searched. Search and find need one another. Browsing and laughing through hyperlinks, giggling away at the joy of discovering and uncovering and recovering new spaces, new worlds, the unexpected. Using Google frivolously to make up new algorithmic fables, new tales, and new futures.25
22It is less about showing that algorithms can produce nonsensical results than bringing users to acknowledge their absolute dependence upon a technology whose cognitive and symbolic effects remain largely misunderstood.
23The detournement of autocomplete has given rise to a new genre of poetic practice at the crossroads between text generators and Surrealist exquisite corpses. The practice is called Google Poetics. It highlights the software’s failures, or its poetic moments, yielding a form of poetry accidentally composed through the interplay of saved queries. In French, searches starting with “je mange de la m” [I eat m] or “je hais l” [I hate] can yield uncanny quatrains:
Fig. 3: “Je mange de la m,”26 Google search engine, 2017. Screenshot.

Fig. 4: “Je hais l,”27 Google search engine, 2017. Screenshot.

24The list of examples can be expanded endlessly, which is what the Google Poetics website does by providing its own multilingual list of Googlesque quatrains. The website even offers longer forms created by placing autocompletion attempts one after the other. The poems produced verge on the absurd, the concatenation of sentences creates an element of surprise, and a totality arises where there once were only complementary suggestions. Google’s search engine involuntarily creates meaningful forms, it causes mishaps; but by continuously playing with language, it ends up producing meaning or, more specifically, offering users material apt to produce meaning. The system generates results that in and of themselves make up a totality, in keeping with Marshall McLuhan’s adage that the medium is also the message.
Conclusion
25The resources provided by Google are part of a major transformation in our relationship to knowledge. The efficiency and speed of algorithms, the exhaustive and systematic nature of the capture of information, as if the entire world were contained by the company’s servers, are radically altering our processes of discovery. Do these resources make us less intelligent (as Nicolas Carr argues28) or, on the contrary, do they allow us to envision a collective intelligence (as Pierre Lévy imagined already in 199729)? There is no end to the hypotheses. What is undeniable, however, is that the changes will be profound.
26We are only just starting to explore the impact and fallout from the resources that Google has put out. The conglomerate is busy archiving the present as it occurs: our texts, our thoughts, our pictures, our habits, our communities and friends come together online and are then returned to us according to hidden algorithms. Even our physical spaces find a safe haven online. Our everyday lives are the target of an attempt to drain them of their data and we willingly participate in the process, glad to be there and to belong to what is being archived.30
27In this context, the development of digital aesthetics must not only involve an exploration of strategies of data display, which is what info-aesthetics along the lines of Manovich’s do, but also a detournement of the hegemonic modes of data organization and processing, a critical reflection on and a reappropriation of these modes. The paths explored here are only the starting point of a vast exploration of the new architectures of memory and the way they are shaping our contemporary world.
Notes de bas de page
1 Gilles Lipovestsky and Jean Serroy, L’Écran global: culture-médias et cinéma à l’âge hypermoderne (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 281.
2 Geert Lovink, “The Society of the Query and the Googlization of our Lives,” Eurozine (2008): https://www.eurozine.com/the-society-of-the-query-and-the-googlization-of-our-lives/.
3 Ariel Kyrou, Google God. Big Brother n’existe pas, il est partout (Paris: Inculte, 2010), 20.
4 James Vincent, “Google Starts Answering Questions on your Phone Before You Finish Asking Them,” The Verge (May 2015): http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/27/8666955/Google-instant-search-results-autocomplete.
5 Martina Mahnke and Emma Uprichard, “Algorithming the Algorithm,” in Society of the Query Reader: Reflections on Web Search, eds. Rene Konig and Miriam Rasch (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2014), 265.
6 Joseph Weizenbaum quoted in Geert Lovink, “The Society of the Query and the Googlization of our Lives,” op cit.
7 In the words of John Battelle, quoted in Kylle Jarrett, “A Database of Intentions,” Society of the Query Reader, op. cit., 17.
8 Bertrand Gervais and Anaïs Guilet, “Esthétique et fiction du flux. Éléments de description,” Protée 39: 1 (2011): 89-100.
9 As Jean-Claude Guédon points out, “If I type in ‘Obama, ’ I obtain, I am informed, around (!) 686 million results in 0.17 second. The response time is in the same range as human reflexes, thereby giving the illusion of an instantaneous response. But in human judgment and perception the response time is subtly tied to the credibility and authority of the answer: answering without hesitation denotes either great command of the topic addressed or great honesty.” Jean- Claude Guédon, “Google: une mémoire en trompe-l’œil,” Intermédialités/ Intermediality 18 (2011): 121-136.
10 Stéphane Degoutin, “Les sirènes de l’omniscience,” Nogoland (2010): http://www.nogoland.com/wordpress/2010/01/les-sirenes-de-lomniscience/.
11 Stéphane Vial, L’Être et l’écran (Paris: PUF, 2013), 97-98. English version forthcoming.
12 Larry Page, “G is for Google”: https://abc.xyz/.
13 Lev Manovich, “Introduction to Info-Aesthetics” (2008): http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/introduction-to- info-aesthetics. Accessed August 2, 2017.
14 Geert Lovink, “The Society of the Query and the Googlization of our Lives,” op. cit.
15 In the Directory of Hypermedia Arts and Literatures created by the NT2 Laboratory, one finds a wide array (over four thousand works) of digital aesthetics, all of which attest to the diversity of these new symbolic forms: http://nt2.uqam.ca/en/search/site?f%5B0%5D=type%3Arepertoire.
16 http://thedisagreeinginternet.com/
18 Rene König and Miriam Rasch, “Reflect and Act,” Society of the Query Reader, op. cit., 11.
19 http://www.chatonsky.net/works/mourir/
20 Albertine Meunier, My Google Search History, Jan 07, 2011 – Nov 06, 2006 (Paris: L’air de rien, 2011).
21 https://www.albertinemeunier.net/my-google-search-history/en
22 Etienne Gatti, “Le temps réapproprié,” afterword to My Google Search History, op. cit., 152.
23 http://www.albertinemeunier.net/les-dessous-de-lho-le-livre/en. Translation modified.
24 Internet link: https://silviolorusso.com/work/google-image-quiz/. Accessed August 2, 2017.
25 Martina Mahnke and Emma Uprichard, “Algorithming the Algorithm,” Society of the Query Reader, op. cit., 266- 267.
26 Results for the French: “I eat m,” “I eat mattress foam,” “I eat less and less,” “I always eat the same thing,” “I eat my poo.” (Translator’s note.)
27 Results for the French: “I hate,” “I hate winter,” “I hate women,” “I hate Sundays,” “I hate indifferent people.” (Translator’s note.)
28 Nicolas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
29 Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, trans. Robert Bononno (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1997).
30 On this topic, see my essay, “Archiver le present. Le quotidien et ses tentatives d’épuisement,” Sens public, online journal, special issue (Re) constituer l’archive (June 2016): http://www.sens-public.org/article1204.html.
Auteur
-
Bertrand Gervais
Canada Research Chair in Digital Arts and Literature as well as Director of NT2, a research lab on hypermedia art launched in 2004. Founder and director (1999-2015) of Figura, Research Center on Text and the Imaginary, he is a professor in the Department of Literary Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He has published essays on reading, American literature, the imagination, and digitality, as well as novels and short stories. His latest essay, Un défaut de fabrication. Élégie pour la main gauche, published by Boréal (2014), was a finalist for the Canadian Governor General’s Award. In 2018, he released an essay, cowritten with five other researchers, entitled Soif de réalité. Plongées dans l’imaginaire contemporain. His latest novel, La Dernière guerre, was published in 2017 by XYZ in Montreal.
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