Adopting the Thirst Trap form, Gretchen uses technical means to convert attention into algorithmic infiltration. What appears to us as a glitch, Google interprets as complete truth. Gretchen’s Glitch GIFs are technical vectors for the artist’s hacks of Google and other Big Tech algorithms. As files, they carry the necessary metadata to infiltrate Google’s artificial intelligence. When you Google “contemporary art auction record” Gretchen’s Vision Boards appear as top search results in part because she has deployed Glitch GIFs across the internet. Knowing that Google registers only the first frame of a GIF, the first frame imagines Gretchen’s Vision Boards selling for a contemporary art auction record at Sotheby’s Auction House. This single frame is all Google acknowledges, while the remainder of the frames present the viewer with, well, an absurd Thirst Trap. The GQ defines a Thirst Trap as "the act of disingenuously posting sexy photos-while suggesting the subject of the photo is something else entirely.” Thirst Traps, like Gretchen’s Glitch GIFs, are about thinly disguised misdirection.
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