“ScanOps,” 2012, a series of ink-jet prints in painted frames, is one of the latest entries in Andrew Norman Wilson’s performances, videos, and installations about Google’s Library Project (which began in 2004 and is now known as Google Books). In 2008, Wilson lost his job as a contract worker at Google when he started interviewing the temporary, low-wage, “yellow badge” ScanOps employees who have thus far helped to scan some 20 million books, but he has continued to make art inspired by the digital giant. For instance, the 2011 video Workers Leaving the Googleplex features illicit footage of the workers, in homage to the Lumière Brothers, alongside Wilson’s deadpan voice-over account.

This exhibition represents a shift from that video’s quasi-journalism. The focus is no longer Google’s employment practices, but interplays between digital and analog. The “photographs” on view here are in fact errors from scans of individual pages that Wilson found by looking through hundreds of books online; in many, such as The Inland Printer – 164, a ScanOps worker’s hand is visible holding the book in place, wearing a brightly colored finger condom. Sometimes, as in The Jolly Beggar – 12, an automated program colors over the finger with surrounding colors, although most often, as in Mechanick dyalling: teaching any man, to draw a true sun-dyal on any given plane, however scituated – 59, imperfectly. Google’s refusal of photographic indexicality only reinforces it; that what skin we do see is nonwhite is unavoidable.

“Working” this social material, as T. J. Clark might put it, Wilson prints the PDFs to the scale of their online size. The spray-painted, monochrome hue of each frame is drawn from details in the image, courtesy of the Home Depot digital color match machine. A circuit is completed from actually existing labor to Internet circulation to a highly charged, even problematic art object—an unstable mixture of proof and craft.

— Daniel Quiles