Emilio Chapela Pérez’s Artwork Mocks Google-Dependancy

Mexico’s “Best Emerging Artist 2008″ Emilio Chapela Pérez makes everyone at Guanabee cry by asking the tough question “what’s the price of taking Google’s word as law?”

Emilio’s 2008 work titled “According To Google…” plays with the question of what it means when the entire internet relies on Google and trusts the search engine to tell them “the truth.” There’s so much implicit faith that Google is based on some magical algorithm that has the answer for everything. This of course leads to some sad moments late at night when you type in questions like “Was it the mayonnaise bikini that drove him away??” and get only stony silence from the empty results page. But we keep forgetting that Google is not omnicient! It does so many things, so well (maps, calculators, figuring out the barbaric metric system) that we kind of assume it can do everything else, too.

Not so, says Emilio Chapela Pérez. But he’s not a hater, just a critic- he wants to point out the daily contradictions, injustices and inadvertently hilarious things that come out of the Google “collective unconscious.” To that end, he made a 40 volume encyclopedia of thousands of images found on Google image search, using terms like “beautiful,” “money,” “art,” etc. That’s one of our favorites, closely followed by the simple wall-graphic with an utter nonsense sentence that he got from an online translator, using just one word. After translating the word “language” through English to Portuguese, German, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, Dutch and back to English, he got this:

By language the communication to guarantee is which is higher used by the system between by animal and one is more computer, but that one no communication will be which not limited.

Exactly.

Click the books for photos of his “According to Google…” show, or if you’re in Mexico City, hurry and see its final days at EDS Galeria, where it will be until January 31st. And if you need a map to find out where the gallery is? Don’t make us say it, you know what to do.

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PULSE Artist Profile: Emilio Chapela Perez [PULSE]

EDS Galeria