GENERATED MAN

CODE, PRINTS, AND BOOK / 2012

Generated Man inquires about how we are represented on the internet by drawing an analogy between personal profiling and role playing games. Increasingly, more internet services track you while you are online in order to create a ‘personalized’ web experience. Tracking means that people end up portrayed as statistics.

The way Google chooses which search results and advertisements to show is probably the most famous example of this. To decide what users are interested in, Google creates a digital persona based on individual’s previous web behaviour. This data is analogous to a character sheet used in role playing games.

Generated Man reverses Google’s system by starting with a character sheet and ending with a digital personal. The values on the sheet are fed into Google’s search engine through a bot. Google then suggests websites based on what it computes as the personality of the artificial web user. The generated personality is presented as a collection of models that the software chooses from formerly Google’s 3D Warehouse. The final collection of images is a portrait of the artificial mediator that represents someone on the internet.

The project’s outcomes are a working computer program, prints and a book containing research and software design details.