The Internet is Here: Warms

The Internet is disappearing – from our screens into our stuff.

To try to think about it I have created 9 triptychs. A small start.

The central image is always a drawing made from observation of a thing I own, (including 2 drawings of screen shots of video calls (which are now a feature of my daily life)).

The left and right hand images are the results of two searches made using Google on 17th March 2015.

• On the left is an image which is the result of a word search, based on an action ascribed to the thing drawn. This word is also the title of each triptych e.g. the first triptych is called ‘Warms’ because a my jumper warms me.
• The right hand image is the result of a search using Google’s image matching function. You upload an image and it finds images that are visually similar.

And I am thinking harder now about what it will mean for art that we can now make so many different kinds of “things” act as the collection point for different kinds of sense data- heat, pressure, acceleration, radiation, tilt, sound, light, electric charge etc- and then use those same devices to redistribute the data in newly wrangled (as yet unknown) forms.

This emerging “Internet of Things” underpins torrents of rhetoric (from politicians, big-business and entrepreneurland) about all manner of things which are getting “smarter” as a result of these developments: homes, cities, shopping.

I’m interested in how they might also help people, communities, organisations, institutions to get smarter. And whether smarter is the right priority. Perhaps we need our homes, cities and shopping to be more equitable, loving, critical, philosophical, cooperative and wise.