Sergey Brin and Larry Page is a generative, 2-channel video portrait that was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery. The eponymous subjects of the work—the co-founders of Google— are portrayed using documentary interviews found on YouTube. Subtitled by Google technology, the footage is subjected, word by word and phrase by phrase, to Google text and image searches that are visualized in real time as the subjects speak.

Larry Page (b. East Lansing, Michigan, 1973) and Sergey Brin (b. Moscow, USSR, 1973) are responsible for delivering the vast quantity of information on the Internet to the average human user through the Google search engine. Despite being in its twelfth year of existence, that work of software engineering is at its core based on a seminal paper entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” which was written by the pair in 1998 when they were 25-year-old Ph.D. students at Stanford University. To “Google” something is to search for it online. In addition to joining the annals of genericized trademarks (for example, Aspirin or Kleenex), for many of us Brin and Page’s company provides the key puzzle piece to unlocking the Internet: the ability to find what we need to know. The sheer ubiquity and breadth of the use of Google makes a portrait of their founders a challenging proposition, given the risk of their invention overshadowing their humanity. My intention in the piece is twofold: one, to deliver a portrait of the two men in dialectic with their technology in a way that highlights their singular contribution to our world while provoking questions about our relationship to their invention; and two, to reorient the viewer’s relationship to the men and their invention by inverting the flow of information. In normal usage, we place our questions to Google (the website), and the results are returned using algorithms that its founders developed. In this portrait, the founders pose the questions, and we become privy to a unique and constantly evolving artistic interpretation of the results.

The piece presented here is not a formal, seated portrait, but rather a portrait in data. This data takes many forms, visual and aural, moving and still, vector and raster, text and mage. All of this data, mined from the Internet using software developed by the artist, focuses on Brin and Page and their use of language in public-facing interviews that they’ve given over the last fifteen years. Their lexicon and verbal mannerisms are then fed into their own search engine, with the results providing data that drives a synchronized, synaesthetic visualization of their prosody and vocabulary.

National Portrait Gallery registrar entry