Edition 1 of 1

Search Engine Artist and Internet Imperialist Gretchen is using art, code and glitter to manipulate contemporary art auction records and Google’s algorithm, displacing historical results with her hopes and dreams for the future. Now you can collect the Rhizome-archived history of this momentous hack.

AI is inherently backward-looking and susceptible to being reprogrammed through knowledge of the internet’s structure. Gretchen exploits this, rewriting existing representations of reality with her dreams by using a search engine’s own rules and limitations against itself. Using the internet’s inability to parse desire, she turned her own hopes into a manifested reality. The literally glittering surface of Gretchen’s NFTs clash with the male-dominated worlds of AI, programming, and political control they operate within.

This unique NFT is a URL linking to a Live Web Archive (Conifer) maintained by Rhizome in which the history of the hack is archived each week. A web archive is a record of web resources. It may include HTML and images, scripts, stylesheets, as well as video, audio and other elements that web pages and web apps are made of, all in one file. Web archives can provide better context than isolated screenshots. They can capture not only content but the behaviors of users and their relationships to one another. They can also offer vivid windows into a moment in time.