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120
Days of Queries is a series of drawings that chronicle the search
engine terms used to enter my personal website babyhans.com. Starting
in 2003, I tracked and recorded these keywords for one hundred and twenty
(non-consecutive) days for a period spanning approximately eighteen months.
The total number of drawings I have created for this series is five
hundred and three. I have eliminated duplicate entries, which
initially totaled over a thousand. Babyhans.com was an account of my life and work started in the year 1999. Until approximately 2005, I updated the site frequently, documenting paintings, writings and performance events and blogging on my own server. I careful tracked how viewers arrived at my site by using a service that records server statistics. What this means is that I was able to record search engine statistics and could examine the words people typed into a search engine (such as Google or Yahoo) to arrive at babyhans.com. My diaristic texts and/or descriptions of artwork, videos, exhibits and performance provided the keywords by which people arrived ay my site. As a part of Los Angeles Outfest 2002, Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis curated a group performance and exhibit with the theme of Pasolini. My project was an interpretation of the bridal scene from ‘120 Days of Sodom’. I was shocked by the number of web surfers who arrived at my website from the documentation of this installation and performance and the text I used to describe the piece. The ensuing visits from web surfers seeking out Pasolini related materials formed the basis of my project. Similarly, documentation of an infantilism installation and performance I had created the previous year, brought numerous fetishists seeking pictures and information. Other surfers arrived at my site from my journal entries discussing my friends, my Los Angeles neighborhood, art shows and films that I’d seen, and events I’d attended. Others arrived via search terms that landed them at my stream of consciousness ‘zine (‘Vomit: a Stalker on Ave A’), which I published online in its entirety. I began to wonder about a surfer’s frustration when they landed at my site expecting to see something sexy or to get some real information or instruction. Instead they would likely be faced with a bunch of photos of my paintings, installations or a rant about my life. Perhaps someone in the general public would have a new or good experience at my site or perhaps they would just exit immediately. I became obsessed with monitoring these search terms and began recording these words with the same obsession as a web surfer. I chose paper, pen and ink as my medium: materials that are small, lightweight and travel well. The drawings became a portable project for me, something that I could pick up and work on while watching movies, flying on an airplane or while sitting around at my day job. I would draw while others around me surfed the net on their laptop computers. Since completing ‘120 Days of Queries”, I have eliminated the main portal to babyhans.com and the pages that were the used as the basis to create this project are accessible only via search engine query. Margie Schnibbe |
