Project Details
The Keys depicts how the strangers – living far 8,000 km away, eastward, on another continent, visualize or conceptualize Hungary. What information are they most interested in, which images become representative symbols, what are the first impressions of Hungary’s people, culture and politics? The answers to all of these questions seem obvious through the statistics shown by search engines.
This project started from personal experiences coming from two different worlds (the cyber and the real) – when the information has been shaped by the interaction between searching keywords and real key-concerns. The research discovers several factors that affect the information results through online media and the culturally different elements that lead to personal culture shocks.
In order to record the images of Hungary reflected through the internet on the one hand, and the real impressions of a Vietnamese person on the other, the work uses an installation infographic. The information printed on a long roll of paper is divided into two parts. The first part is elevated and passed through three filters that search engines use to manipulate information (search engine vendors, local government censorship, and the online action-history of the users). The second part, on the floor, shows the real-life impressions of personal experiences in Hungary.