For these three images I have intentionally chosen a romantic, almost trashy name.

Not only because I would like to remind people of the clarity of former artists.

But also because I want to pick up a theme very important to me:
The process of viewing, because this is what makes art.
In today’s online flood of images, many images are lost, hardly viewed or not viewed at all.
Because there are so many other images they get lost in the crowd.
At the same time, there is little time to really contemplate the images one is looking at. With time and with leisure. And to think about them while doing so.
Most people scroll through their feeds and rarely, if ever, stop.
And what happens when we stop scrolling through our feed because an image has caught our attention ?
We open the post and read whether and what the author writes about the image.
We let ourselves and what we think and feel about the image be driven by the metadata (the title, the description and the hashtags).

Even more, the images that are shown to us in our feeds are selected by an algorithm based on this very metadata.
We are not shown what really interests us and what would actually affect us.

Instead, we are shown the images that an algorithm selects based on the metadata of past images and those of current images.

And this algorithm is only guided by the metadata – because it is not able to capture the true content of an image.
If an image would show a cat and the metadata belonging to the image would only speak of a camel, this cat image would be shown to camel friends, although it, in reality, has nothing to do with a camel. Whereas of course the philosophical question must be asked here, what would be the reality here.

We are guided and controlled by metadata and algorithms in what we are shown and in what we are thinking and feeling when we look at the feed images.

These dark images of bare trees by a river, which to me express what many people felt during the pandemic, is probably shown next to cheerful winter images by the algorithm through their titles and their tags.
Yet these images, in reality, say something quite different….

printed on Giclée Hahnemühle German Etching