kotka gudmon: manifest of the newest testament or how to deal with the everyday? 2018 / creator, performer
Studiobühne UHH, Hamburg
The results of a google search is influenced by invisible, AI-driven algorithms, scoring, SEO settings and advertisement - letting the users to reach or being unable to see certain findings. This kind of filtering could also be seen as a way of canonization - argues the performer, Kotka Gudmon.
Before the Internet, the most common information source of the globe, where most of the search for answers was conducted, was the Bible. In our age, Google could be seen as a double canonized, continuously changing „newest testament“: not only Google is „The Book“ that anyone can access and „open“ for answers at any time, also the contents are continuously re-„written“ according to algorithms and the top search expressions of the local users, but beyond that, it also determines faith. Faith, as the more results are to be found about a topic, the more the user believes its existence and significance, and the lesser references are to be found the least probable is even to think about the existence of the searched topic.
Given the over-commercialized nature of Google one might ask the question, if the belief in the results, as an understanding of the world, as a sense of truth, is well founded. Also, there is an urgency to ask, what kind of contemporary cultural identity is reflected in the yearly Google search-expression-statistics. In the performance Kotka struggles with a Google window and with some of those expressions that are not contained by the „canon“, by the top German Google search expressions from 2017.
