Nancy Daly’s current body of work examines how the development of the online social world is affecting identity and social behavior. By creating interactive machines reminiscent of outdated technology, she addresses the contradictions present in various social media that are at once ephemeral and entirely permanent. Interactivity and the vocabulary of minimalist sculpture are key elements of her installations that challenge the viewer to look beyond the user-friendliness of online technology and consider what their participation in social media means.

STATEMENT FOR “ABOUT 286,000,000 RESULTS”

On the internet, frequency has become more important than value when establishing relevance. Companies not only need to create products, but they have to generate written content about them with unceasing fervor in order to remain on the first page of search engine results. Often, these companies outsource content management and blog posting to keep up with the relentless demands for content, while not expending their time and energy doing so. These hired content writers, often not experts in the fields they are writing for and often writing for upwards of 10 clients a day in a wide range of fields, must first do research. Short on time because of high daily word count demands, these content writers turn to the internet as the most obvious source of information. They find themselves citing other companies and organizations who are presumably also employing content writers to do the same sort of research. The result is the same information, appropriated and rearranged in different ways and put back into the internet in an endless loop. This series addresses this process of research, regurgitation, and buildup that has become so prevalent online and that only serves to dilute and obscure the content being cited.

www.nancy-daly.com