Review | I Love Alaska
In an age where we all seem to openly share the details of our lives online, comes I Love Alaska by Lernert Engelberts and Sander Plug: a 13-episode documentary on MiniMovies, that creates a picture of one woman through the queries she entered into the AOL search engine between 1 March and 31 May 2006. The story goes that on 4 August 2006, the personal search queries of 650,000 users over a three-month period ended up on the Internet for 3 days before AOL realised the mistake and took them down again. Engelberts and Plug were two individuals, no doubt of many, who copied this data and made use of it for their own purposes.
The success of the documentary lies in the gradual picture that builds up of the woman through her searches, often about health, celebrities, sex, food and relationships. Her queries are often phrased more like thoughts spoken aloud than questions, such as ‘the guy I had an affair with won’t leave me alone’ or ‘cruises to the Bahamas are for poor people’. Visually the film adds to the isolation of its subject, as every episode is shot as a single, static shot of a vast, beautiful, but barely populated Alaskan landscape.
I was surprised at how absorbing the piece was. I like the fact that the content is highly confessional, but at the same time the piece is presented in a clinical fashion, suggesting the injustice of this kind of inconspicuous data analysis. Each episode is introduced with a title card that summarises the users concerns during the given date range and throughout the woman is referred to as User 711391. Each day’s queries are introduced with a repetitious bell ring, reminiscent of new email notifications, and are voiced by a woman in a relatively neutral tone.
The Amsterdam based duo, Engelberts and Plug recently sent me a link to one of their recent videos, CDEFGABC, where they play No Limits by 2 Unlimited on a glass harp and from this I thankfully discovered their I Love Alaska project. And, one of my favourite films by them, the disturbing short for kids tv, Chocolade Haas.
I Love Alaska – Trailer from SubmarineChannel on Vimeo.
-Ab-
clairewelsby
Ab
I really like this piece too. I love the idea how our searches build a piece meal picture of ‘who we are,’ and ‘what we feel,’ at any given time…
The privacy issue is also a really important one. Such data is human and often private after all…
clairewelsby said this on February 9, 2009 at 1:08 am