Deletion Process, 2015, 2019

Have you ever wished you could hide traces of your digital self that are left online? Deletion Process_Only you can see my history exposes artist Kyriaki Goni’s Google Search history between 2008 and 2013.

On the screen are 10,650 unfiltered terms and images that the artist searched for over a period of eight years. In this project, you can delete one term from her search history. Once the term is deleted on screen, the white square representing it eventually turns black, and the term gets printed out on roll paper along with the date of search and deletion.

Your personal search history on Google doesn’t necessarily belong to you. Rather, it is part of a larger data profile that is used by advertisers to target you. Deletion Process offers a window into that archive of one person’s intimate data – and to see how it feels to erase it.

Text from the pop-up exhibition The Glass Room San Francisco in October 2019 curated by Tactical Tech and Mozilla Foundation.