Carla Adams Is Making Her Weird Late Night Internet Experiences into Art

Carla Adams' art is at once deeply personal and disconcertingly universal. Much of her work unpacks the psychic and emotional distance between our online lives and the real world, the tragedy and absurdity of mediating between those two spaces.

In her 2015 work alone in an empty room, Adams displays found photographs of the domestic workspaces used by online web cam performers. The series is soft and sad, looking at the quotidian realities which underpin the hyper-sexualised fantasy universe of a cam girl. Occasional sex toys seen strewn across grey doona covers and couch cushions accentuate their drab environments with sudden phallic streaks of fluorescent pink.

Google Search History is a much more light hearted exploration of the artist’s own personal and working life. The series takes transcriptions of the artist’s Google search histories, arranging them into digital prints that read like abstract poetry.

The series began in 2014 with a one off laser etched acrylic print for a fundraising event. “It was only recently that I started toying with the idea of this being an ongoing series,” the Perth-based artist tells The Creators Project.

“Every few months or so I transcribe my Google search history from my iPhone into a visual diary. But that’s more to remind myself of ideas or artists I look up than anything else."

Adams’ work is defined by its honesty. “I have only censored one search term because it was the address of a house I bought,” she says. “Some of the weirder ones are from late at night, which I think is the magic hour for strange Google searches.”

The series looks at more than the personally specific. Its emotional power comes from an ability to reflect universal anxieties. “I like it when people have similar Google searches to me," Adams says. “It’s the ‘sexy man nude’ collective consciousness.”

Sometimes the collective consciousness can separate itself from reality. “There is one [search term] which people ask me about the most, and that’s the 'two rocks aberiginel spirit' one,” the artist explains.

“I was trying to find a blog post that featured a huge sculpture of Neptune that exists in an abandoned theme park in Perth. Someone thought that Neptune was an Indigenous spirit and spelt ‘aboriginal’ really wrong. It always made me laugh but I could never find it again.”

Seeing our lives reflected in these strange glimpses of internet ephemera can be surreal, and Adams tackles this feeling directly.

“I think something that I am always trying to do is make something physical from the intangible. Whether the intangible is a digital photo, a series of messages, a fleeting encounter or in this case, a bunch of Google searches. These works exist as physical objects, you can hold them in your hands.”

Of course, there’s something terrifying about the tangibility of all this information. Adams’ work makes us reimagine our relationships with all these online histories which are so easy to dismiss as invisible data.

You can find out more about Carla Adams here and follow her on Instagram.

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