The Best MFA. The next American president. The cover of Artforum. When you Google these phrases, perhaps you are expecting a list of universities, or politicians, or the glossy pages of Artforum Magazine. Instead, when you click on the Images tab, you are welcomed with various vision boards, filled with illustrations and collaged objects including flowers, buttons, and stickers. This is the work of Gretchen Andrew, an artist who hacks Google Search algorithms to feature her work, who chooses particular phrases pertaining to her personal, professional, and political future to produce her vision boards as the top search result.
After Gretchen received her bachelor’s degree in Information Systems at Boston College, she went on to work in Silicon Valley—at the paradigmatic tech company, Google. In this environment, Gretchen expresses that she was not being rewarded for being herself and women were often shadowed by their male counterparts. Gretchen explains, “I didn’t see women succeeding there… there weren’t female leaders, there weren’t women who were considered visionaries in the industry. There weren’t any female equivalents to Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs.” Fed up with her erasure of self, Gretchen decided to leave Silicon Valley and explore her true passions in art, which she weaponizes as a counterpoint to the limitations of the tech industry.
Gretchen’s artistic process begins with the creation of physical moodboards, decorating canvases with symbols of indulgence and objects that are viewed as traditionally feminine. These include gold high heeled shoes, ribbons, teddy bears, cutouts of luxury magazines, wire corks from champagne bottles. Next, Gretchen works to manipulate the search terms on Google, choosing a term that pertains to the message behind her piece. These terms express very personal desires, such as “Best MFA,” so that she is able to reflect her dreams back to us in a way that feels jarring against typical or expected search results. “You see something that looks wrong because it’s feminine—in a place of power, in a place of digital, political power,” she explains.
Through manipulating a system that often controls us, Gretchen takes back the control and cuts back at the all-knowing, venerable perception we have regarding Google. Her ability to pierce through Google’s algorithm invites other women into this experience, for them to join her in tapping their way into “political, technical and art world power.”
Gretchen has discovered the defect of technology like Google: it can’t parse desire and instead only focuses on relevance. While we understand that her search terms are hopes and dreams, things that haven’t happened, Google can only produce existent images sorted by relevance. Therefore, Gretchen inserts her vision boards as manifestations of these dreams: “I use the space of desire collapsed with relevance to then have Google give it to me now. It doesn’t understand that desire separation.” Thus, Gretchen hacks into a system, an industry that constantly puts her last, to receive the power she deserves. Gretchen exposes artificial intelligence’s inability to pursue abstraction with the juxtaposition of her desire.
Her vision boards are not purely limited to the digital world. In various exhibitions across the world, Gretchen brings her art to a live audience for a tactile experience. Currently, Gretchen has a solo exhibition at the Annka Kultys Gallery in London that will run for a month from April 22 through June 6. In these exhibitions, Gretchen describes that next to each vision board, there is wall text with prompts for viewers to Google the corresponding key phrases. Rather than project the search results to everyone, Gretchen wants to create an intimate revelation in each viewer because “when you see my work infiltrate your own personal device, there is something quite disconcerting and powerful about it that is part of the darker implications of my work. That I’m doing this in a way that’s playful and potentially positive and tries to help people understand how the Internet works, that is also very scary because it’s done in ways that people don’t recognize all the time.”
Through her work, Gretchen is able to speak to both women in tech and women in the art world—who all often share similar experiences of desire suppressed by the larger male dominated industry and power structure. Now, Gretchen is reconnecting with past female colleagues from the tech world in order to build a bridge between their experience in the industry and her creations.
As Gretchen continues with her work, she hopes to “rule the art world with a jeweled open palm,” rather than an iron fist. Being within the art industry, working in galleries and major institutions, she hopes to change the industry from the inside in the same way she changes artificial intelligence from the inside. More generally, Gretchen wants to destroy the connotation that wanting something means not having something and is therefore taboo. Making her work all about what she doesn’t have, Gretchen hopes to make people more comfortable with talking about and pursuing their desire.
To young girls who are growing up with the Internet, Gretchen encourages them to view it not as something concrete and unmalleable and instead dream about what technology they want. She wants young girls to ask themselves: “if they ran these companies, what would it look like? If they had invented these products, what would it look like? To then try imagining and dream about what it would be like to be in charge and build it.” More than just learning coding languages and technical skills, Gretchen expresses the importance of nurturing possibility, to give young girls the space to imagine and build anything they want through art and tech.
Gretchen left Google, where she was not able to express herself, to hack Google with unlimited dreams. Her journey is one of reclamation. Her work wields power. Gretchen expresses, “I am now rewarded for being as true to myself as possible.”
Check out Gretchen Andrew’s website here, follow her on Instagram here.
