When Taryn Simon, a photographer and artist, collaborated with the computer programmer Aaron Swartz last April, she noticed that the way he logged into his online accounts seemed exceptionally complex. "The length of time it took to enter his password conveyed a certain pressure that was upon him," Simon told me. And indeed, he was facing criminal charges at the time, following his arrest in 2011 for illegally accessing Jstor, a private scholarly database. "There was this sense that something was closing in on him," Simon added. "Something that needed to be guarded against."
Despite the government's case against him, Swartz, who committed suicide last week at the age of 26, was regarded by some as an Internet folk hero and a visionary activist devoted to making locked-up information of public interest freely available. Emily Bazelon, has written at Slate, where she's an editor, that "the government's ratcheting up of charges against Swartz reeks of the worst kind of prosecutorial intimidation." (Bazelon has also written for the magazine.)
Simon and Swartz were paired together as part of the 2012 edition of Seven on Seven, an annual conference organized by Lauren Cornell at the New Museum where artists and technologists are given 24 hours to create a project together.
The result of Simon and Swartz's collaboration was Image Atlas, a visual search engine that performs real-time queries in 17 different countries. Internet search results can vary depending on what part of the world they originate from — if you're sitting in Paris Googling the words "Jew" or "Breaking Bad," the results will be different than if you're searching the same terms from, say, Tel Aviv. Image Atlas first translates any search term into the language corresponding to each country; it then uses each country's most popular search engine to run an image search. The result is like Google Images with international context — it forces us to think about what we are and are not seeing when we browse online. (Try it for yourself).
Simon and Swartz were intrigued by the idea that Internet search results express a certain type of authority; people generally aren't suspicious of a search-results page in and of itself. "We wanted to question the neutrality of statistical data," she told me.
They also observed that people around the world are communicating more and more with one another through visual imagery rather than text. Image Atlas seems to suggest that visual thinking, is far from universal and instead varies greatly across cultures (search "America" in Egypt and you'll get the Statue of Liberty; in Iran, Taylor Swift; in Kenya, the Bank of America logo).
Simon, whose photographs of items confiscated by security at Kennedy Airport were featured in the magazine, remembers Swartz as being "astounding to watch" when he was coding something, a "wizardly court stenographer." It took him just 10 minutes, Simon recalled, to create an early prototype of Image Atlas after the hours they spent brainstorming to conceptualize it.
Image Atlas served as inspiration for Simon's latest project, "The Picture Collection," which opened at the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco on Wednesday. The work is a series of photographs of the contents of an archive also called the Picture Collection, located in the New York Public Library. Founded in 1915, the archive consists of more than 12,000 folders, each labeled with a term like "happiness," "veils" or "accident" and filled with clippings of related images. For years, before there was anything like Google Images, artists and designers went to the archive for inspiration. Simon photographed the contents of 44 folders from the Picture Collection for her project.
Looking ahead, Simon told me that she is planning to publish a book based on how Image Atlas results vary over time, as international events and moods change. "It is something Aaron would have been a part of," she said.
Image Atlas will continue on as a Web site. Since the news of Swartz's death, the site's servers have at times become overloaded. "Normally, if the site would stop working, I would turn to Aaron in those moments," Simon told me. "But now the wizard is gone."
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