And finding an artist who hid her entire life by searching.
This piece is coming from someone who has experimented and had success in SEO for 25+ years, and occasionally likes to check on what’s coming up these days on the web.
You know, coming up like flowers from the dirt. Or coming up like non-curated titles ‘by keyword’ in a library catalog. Results via web search are supposed to be clear and fair, but have never been that. Instead, web results are an amalgam of various organic and paid strategies, content both AI sloppy and real, index preferences, verified accounts and people willing and able to pay to play.
Organic search is still my absolute favorite.
Just now, a Google image search for Elizabeth Matteson artist yielded this:
The work on the right is mine, from last week. The work on the left, by a woman named Helen Matteson, considered an “outsider” artist, meaning she made work for her own enjoyment, not necessarily to show. Her brilliance with geometry, symbols, dots and keeping her work quiet, are of great interest to me, and also unknown to me, until today.
The similarities in color and form and her nature as an artist speak to me on more than one level. The fact that we share a last name (in both our cases, married names), also intriguing.
Apparently, she hid her work even from her husband, an art teacher, all 8000 of them.
Searching the web has been an ever-growing field, and now, feels like it includes a touch of serendipity too. The serendipity gives me pause about the purported intelligence of AI and how it organizes and presents things. Word matching remains at the core of all search results, but so many other connections are made as you play with the various parameters and view source code of the websites that garner the top results.
And as my below art search showed me, the top results are not always the most intriguing.
Don’t believe me? Perhaps you could try searching for your name/s with positive or aspirational terms (lest you go down some true crime or paranoid conspiracy hole – don’t do that).
See, back in the late 1990’s, you could still alt tag the daylights out of images, stick well-crafted white text on a white background, link to related and quality web-stuffs like a mutha, and write meaningful, search-friendly copy.
…and wind up “find-able” not just “search-able” on the web, even if you were a small-town business, or ordinary individual. Back then, I loved staying abreast of the algorithm, and helping regular people to win on the web without resorting to paying for placement.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is what I’ve always known to be true: the internet is a reflection of what the world is like, and can be a driver of thinking1 and further creation too. Yet because search is guided by its own internal logic built by thousands of players with continual experimentation, serendipity can come along and provide moments of revelation too.
And that is fun.
I’m grateful to have learned about Helen Matteson and feel enriched by the read. I feel connected a bit to her too except I’m not hiding my art until death. I’ve been biding time making a few dollars in search and marketing until I can roll my art work out to the public in high-quality physical form. Just you wait….
Perhaps you too can try this experiment and share what you find: Search on your name, and an aspirational/positive terms together, and see what you find.
I’d love to hear your impressions.
Happy searching and finding today. Off I go to hike the North South Trail with a friend.
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT
Read a little more about Helen Matteson here. And here.
- I would not be writing this piece without having seen this visually-intruguing result. ↩︎