In May 2007, Google, the ubiquitous web search engine, stopped producing a weekly list of the most frequent search queries. Instead, they started producing a daily list of 'hot trends," a more dynamic and up-to-the-minute pulse-taking of global consciousness. This shift from weekly to daily tabulation of search data allowed the results to instantly reflect what occupies the public mind, the information the world hungers for on any given day.

In December of 2006, while Google was still posting its weekly listing of search terms, I started a project to create an image library associated with each item on the weekly Google Zeitgeist list. At the end of each week, they posted a new list of search terms, showing the most significant percentage increase in frequency for the preceding week. I used that list as a starting point for a Google image search on each topic. Using software that allowed me to cull every image associated with a particular search topic, I collected hundreds, sometimes thousands, of images related to each of the top 15 search terms for the previous week.
Zeitgeist is a German word that means "spirit of the times." I wanted to capture an idea in these images as they flickered across the public consciousness. Google's Zeitgeist revealed the views, people, and events that momentarily distracted us; sports heroes and actors, births and deaths, and public and private concerns, expressed directly or indirectly through the images that illustrate the internet. By collecting pictures related to zeitgeist keyword searches, I hoped to create a pictorial cloud, a visual fog, that resists functioning as a succinct definition of its subject, as it loops around a verbal meaning and is affected by personal interpretation.

KOL - January 2012