internet.flowers is a garden made of 999 images of flowers extracted from the artist’s browsing history. The work employs a custom, artist-built Chrome extension that scans the websites Ben Amar visits, using a computer vision model she trained to detect and save images of flowers. internet.flowers addresses two of today’s most pressing technological concerns: the privacy of one’s digital data, and the rise of image recognition technology. On the one hand, the artist’s Chrome extension runs in the background of her browser, capturing data from her sessions, which later gets uploaded to the internet.flowers website for all to see. Browsing the internet, a private activity, is rendered public. However, stripped from their original contexts, the flowers have abstracted any trace of the websites they were derived from, adding a layer of obfuscation and anonymity. The artwork is also an interesting commentary on the rise of the wide scale implementation of image recognition technologies. Many of the images published on internet.flowers are pixellated, blurred, and have little actual resemblance to a flower, questioning how accurate such models can be, and what consequences this may have when applied to society-at-large.
Mika Ben Amar is working in the gap between what digital infrastructures know about us and what we know about ourselves. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.