Cohen tackles the search engine’s impact on relationality/human interaction and aesthetics in the work-in-progress “Search Engine Subjectivities.” Cohen remarks about the “coming-into-form of search queries as a mode of nascent or nonce social interaction…even a form of recognizable personhood or basis for relationality” (6). However, a major question the chapter poses is whether encounters with projects like Thomson & Craighead’s Beacon involve encounters with people (who type content into search engines), non-human entities (i.e., computers or the Internet), both, or neither? This line of inquiry is total interesting to consider in the current moment, and it is also critically impactful for our “entire idea of aesthetic intervention” (42).

Cohen elaborates: “the point is not to draw a distinction between savvy and naïve search engine users; it is to notice that that particular difference doesn’t matter much in this context,” in other words, the search engine does not discriminate among users, even though its algorithms provide seemingly individual responses. The fact that the search engine searches the same way regardless of how people use it or what they use it for seems for Cohen to mean that artists cannot engage with it as they have with other technologies, products, or constructions. “Our entire idea of aesthetic intervention might need to change: change to accommodate a structure that cannot be shifted by knowledge, that cannot be interrupted by defamiliarization, or antagonism, or subversion, or queering as these have been understood in the long history of modernist aesthetics” (42). Early in the chapter, Cohen sites Thomson & Craighead referring to the search queries in Beacon as “endless concrete poetry,” and I wonder whether Cohen sees it that way. As Diana and I can tell you, flarf poetry, which incorporates search results into its content, is a movement in contemporary poetry. I wonder how Cohen would theorize it. Does it illustrate an alternative to the illusion of choice Cohen refers to in regard to the search engine—use it or don’t, search engines remain unchanged, “they make all forms of critique into luddism, the starkest refusal” (40)?