Blogger Skins

The online version of Marcin Ramocki's "blogger skins" project is here. As mentioned previously, the premise of this artwork is to assemble portrait collages of the first 100 images that come up when you Google search "Paddy Johnson," "James Wagner," "Joy Garnett," "Regine Debatty," and "Tom Moody" (the common denominator is that all the subjects have been fairly active bloggers for a while).
Clearly Debatty, who publishes the blog We Make Money Not Art, is the most successful personage among us, as the first dozen hits are photos of her. This means people with huge amounts of Google juice have linked to her and pushed these images to the top of the heap. Garnett is the most successful artist, as it is her paintings that fill the top slots. James Wagner is disadvantaged by having a common name, while I have been sharing Google with an Austral1an cr!cket pl4yer and co4ch for many years now. The drawings occupying the #1 and #2 slots for my name are actually drawings by me published in a Dallas zine when I lived there years ago. Almost two decades later and the artist is still sniffing the critic's butt and shining the curator's shoes.

Update: Photos of the work installed in a gallery are here. The piece deals with identity construction in the digital age but as I've said before that is generally cause for despair. Some people really obsess over Google ranks but they're peer review in the most imperfect sense. When you are mingled with someone that has your name it's more like recombinant genetics than identity.