"The Ontology of Social Data" represents my attempt to unveil the social realities of the digital age. It explores and reflects on how individuals function as fundamental elements of social composition and humanity's persistent quest for totality, using social data collected by Google Maps from diverse cultures worldwide. The work also interrogates what these social data signify in our present moment.

Within these Google Maps screenshots, the individual is maximally effaced (Google's AI-applied mosaics generate multitudes of anonymous figures). This very condition highlights the ideology embedded within Google Maps, as it predominantly presents a Western-centric perspective of the world. Consequently, the work shifts towards presenting a form of totality—furthermore, a kind of divinity. This divinity emerges when humanity overcomes its particularity and moves towards the totality of the human collective, thereby realizing an eternal promise for humankind.

We have encountered this promise before: in religion, which legitimizes humans as God's children or believers and promises human eternity; and in the museum, which dams the flow of time for artifacts of the past, promising the eternity of matter and history. Today, internet data constructs a new idol for us—an eternity of the Aura.

While matter is absent within the internet, the specific "here and now" of the data's original context is perpetually constructed and regenerated in the viewer's mind as they contemplate the data. Under the weight of this promise, data-driven immortality seems increasingly plausible: AI simulating the deceased, mind uploading, and even Google Maps itself functions as a preservation of the social Aura of the present moment.

In attempting to sculpt this new divinity within the work, within the field it creates, this fragile divinity no longer points elsewhere—it points back to its creator: the artist themself. I employ this reductive approach to compel the viewer to contemplate the present we inhabit.

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