series of 13 Gicleé Prints, 2004

“We decipher that which lends itself to cipher and
discard the rest as surplus.” – Dave Hickey, “Air Guitar”

Google Air Guitar is a translation of the 2,835 word essay “Air Guitar” by contemporary art critic and writer, Dave Hickey into 996 individual images culled from the internet using the Google search engine. Each word within the essay is represented by one image which is used throughout the print suite. All images were separately collected from the internet between February 26 and April 16, 2004. At that time, each image was the first, second or third result on the Google image search option, depending on the first website’s immediate availability.

Dave Hickey has written for many major American cultural publications including Rolling Stone, Interview, Artforum, Art News, Art in America and The New York Times. He has authored two books collecting his essays, 1993’s The Invisible Dragon and 1997’s Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, which the essay “Air Guitar” lent its title to. In this essay, Hickey states that in the act of writing about art, “you press language to the point of fracture and try to do what writing cannot do; account for the experience.” He goes on to say that, "in a culture that is irrevocably saturated with pictures and music… the question of whether we can enjoy, or even decipher, the world we see without the experience of images, or the world we hear without the experience of music, seems to me pretty much a no-brainer."

In February of 2005, Joe Fyfe, a visiting artist and art critic from NYC, gave a lecture in which he concluded by saying that one of the reasons he makes simple, meditative and subdued paintings is because he is constantly bombarded by imagery. Thinking about this statement as well as the act of critiquing art, using Google as a teaching tool while assisting a digital printing class, and reading art related theory all lead to the idea of translating a text about art back into the images it obliterated. Hickey’s essay “Air Guitar” mirrored this idea perfectly.

Google’s image search is inevitably time based, taking into account file name and hits per image. The most popular images for a particular search are listed first and so on. However, because of the very nature of the internet, search results fluctuate; the results for a particular search may not yield the same results today as it did a month ago. Soon, Google Air Guitar will be rendered completely untranslatable except to the original text. It’s already a dead language.

What’s left then is a complete bombardment of images, some evoking associations with the word it represents while others remain completely ambiguous. Google Air Guitar serves as a record of internet photos, drawings and graphics representing a month and a half long period. Baby photos, pet pictures, cartoons, cars, clipart, computer screenshots and vacation snapshots weave into a tapestry of color and shape. The sheer quantity of images lined in a grid along the wall creates a surprising sense of quiet and calmness. Enough patterns are formed and clues given, however, to suggest the structure and content of a different language, one almost but not quite translatable.