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What happens when a keyword is entered in a field in a search engine? What does the work of searching and finding consist of when it is only with the help of sophisticated algorithms and laborious manual work that possible queries and their results can be brought into a meaningful arrangement that give us the feeling of actually having found something? What does »find« mean, if it does not signify the successful end of a search, but rather only a moment of overwriting that takes what is already known and forgotten as the basis for a further search? What kind of mirror is being held up before us when entering our own name not only produces a terribly distorted self-image but also a number of doppelgängers? To whom does the search belong when the paths of a research process can easily be retraced at any time?

Sometimes it helps to leave one’s desk and go off on a research trip. We might find something we were never looking for in the first place and become authors of our own search, driving it forward based on a dark presentiment that something is missing or that things happen of which we know nothing. »Forum on Quaero« is emblazoned in large letters on the entrance portal to the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, proclaiming a public »think tank« that promises to call into question the architecture and politics of search engines. And in fact what will happen in the next few days really is unpredictable and uncalculated – experts will come together who don’t claim to know everything already. A rare euphoria will result, bound up with the wish to understand the search for the better search engine as something explicitly political.

When, two years ago, the design research team »Metahaven« needed to come up with a logo for the European search engine project »Quaero« – a Franco-German cooperation that Jacques Chirac claimed at the time, boldly and somewhat prematurely, would be the European answer to Google – Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden, Gon Zifroni and later Tsila Hassine presumably didn’t realize the dimensions of what they were taking on. »Naive« is what Daniel van der Velden calls their approach today in passing and with a touch of self-irony. But in principle a certain cluelessness and unselfconsciousness can still be felt in the group’s endeavors. Metahaven continues to take the matter of the search engine not only seriously, but perhaps even a bit too seriously – both the question of the relationships between interface and term, color and politics, as well as the political, legal or psychoanalytical dimensions of the respective terms themselves.

»What Quaero already signifies with its Latin name is the melancholy of Europe – the impossibility of finding a collective experience, a living and meaningful symbol for Europe as a territorial unit. In that sense, Quaero’s mission statement could be: ›Searching for Europe‹.« Quaero as project soon failed due to the irreconcilable economic and political interests of the consortia involved. The stages in which Metahaven developed the Quaero logo, trying not to emulate the look of Google’s, and the chronicle of failure – all of this has been researched and reconstructed carefully, with Metahaven documenting it in detail and making precisely those aspects productive that seem to have been lost: »Quaero’s ›lost image‹ is what Metahaven proposes to create from scratch.«

Metahaven begins by launching a new search: »Quaero Uncorporate & Virtual Territories, Real Borders« is its new motto. The members look to theory for guidance and pay a visit to Etienne Balibar, telling him: »It seems as though Quaero is bringing territorial ambitions and old antagonisms (Europe vs. the USA) into a virtual realm that is at the same time becoming a politicized space and an arena that is relentlessly charged with commercial dominance.« Balibar does not reply, but instead poses his own questions, asking what »territory« actually means in this context, and what constitutes action in virtual space.

Metahaven drives its search forward in various directions – philosophical, technical, political and aesthetic – and underscores the fragmentary nature of its divergent results and how they overlap and parallel one another by means of windows on its website that pop up in unexpected places. Not at first glance and not front and center, but rather only after some searching does a rich trove then reveal itself to the user. This multifaceted and multiplicatory approach is ultimately also reflected in the list of invited experts. What runs like a thread through the conference and intensifies the debate on the political level is the question of where to draw the real, imaginary and symbolic borders. When Richard Rogers asks the rhetorical question: »Do search engines have politics?«, he is ultimately asking about the limitations of visibility and the politics of making things visible. He pursues this line of inquiry using the example of selected pages he has been following in the Google ranking for several years, and with the help of numerous graphs and tables. Florian Cramer operates beyond the user interface. In »Animals That Belong to the Emperor« he traces a trajectory from the Renaissance to so-called Web 2.0 in order to demonstrate the European longing for universal classification systems and to show how these have failed. »Microsoft Resident Fellow« Michael Zimmer from Yale Law School on the contrary projects horror stories across the screen of surveillance and control in order to show how the borders between public and private are shifting and blurring. Jodi Dean in turn takes as her point of departure the strange bloating of the private realm within and through the blogospheres. Blogs are to her a technology for managing distributed, decentralized subjectivities, for mastering the fears triggered by an unstructured, chaotic information space with the help of individualized and personalized guideposts instead of using seemingly innocent, algorithmically sorted search engine results lists. Florian Schneider by contrast proposes an analogy between a search engine ostensibly based on the European identity and operating within its boundaries and a postmodern border regime that purports to be able to »manage« migration.

Everything seemed to have been said already, every possible playing field having its catch, and yet no one wanted to declare themselves satisfied with merely complaining or accepting the state of things, much less with developing alternatives and new projects for which it is already foreseeable that they will fail sooner or later due to the same problems.

In his closing talk, Schneider tried to localize what is »political« about this kind of hopelessness. Quoting Paolo Virno, he suggested we simply leave the question of Quaero, the lamenting of the Californian Google golem, behind us, along with all the talk of the temptations of search engines: »Exodus means, more than taking power or subduing it, exiting. Exiting means constituting a distinct context, new experiences of non-representative democracy, new modes of production.«

»Exodus« is now the motto and working title for a follow-up project devoted to the architecture, design and functionalities of a search engine based on open source code, transparent algorithms and peer-to-peer technologies. A promising approach has already been initiated in association with »Open Search.« This is a project that can build on both long years of experience and what is often the difficult-to-convey expert knowledge of the pioneers, but one that does not view the principle of decentralization only as a technological foundation, but also as a construction principle. This principle does not try to generalize and bring together the diverse individual interests of archives, libraries, magazines and Web projects under one business plan, but instead realizes that they each have their own features as unique media and tries to go beyond these to make them productive, so to speak »postmedially.«

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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