“Netaphors” series are collages based on my photo portraits that interact with the web and aim to explore the meaning of the presence of billions of virtual images and to give an example of a creative interaction with them. For everyone, the image of their face is the primary way to represent themselves. In the age of the Internet, how should we interpret this ? For this purpose I have used my portraits and the Google images search engine. Today Google is no longer just a powerful search engine. It can explore the entire universe of the web, and more and more it resembles a sort of collective conscience that memorizes, reproduces and connects words and images everywhere. Google has a social function, since it shows how we are now, how we were once, and how we represent our lives and ideas. The Google images search engine not only finds photos associated with a word, but also allows us in a few seconds to see if a single photo has already been published on the web, directly showing the webpages where it appears. Just click on the small camera icon to upload our image and see the result.

Besides this, however, the Google images search engine has another function; automatically it shows all the images, similar in colour and form to our image, from the entire universe of images present on the web. I thought of using this function to create some collages based on my female portraits. In the center of the collage there is my photo, around these there are the small thumbnails of images from Google Image associated to that portrait. In this way, Google Image compares my photo portraits – taken in accordance with my specific photographic style and my cultural and visual background – together with all the images (paintings, photos, drawings) existing on the web. It seems to me that the final result is striking and metaphoric, in some cases even ironic.