Google is the main hub of an emerging data-driven world. It is a beast with many faces, impossible to grasp all at once and growing new limbs every day. It is also the name of many contradictions: a centralized traffic control in the (supposedly) horizontal and distributed Internet; a supporter of data openness and accessibility that relies on secret algorithms; and a ranking technology that is based on finding out popularity while it simultaneously determines it. Google Variations is a series of approximations of some of these diverse aspects of Google. It is a collection of formal and conceptual micro-experiments, a fly-eyed view of an entity so pervasive that it tends to be invisible while it radically changes our lives. Google Variations employs multiple strategies to de-naturalize our relationship with the brand, the corporation and the technology.

with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts