The internet furnishes our lives with an unavoidable wallpaper of consumer culture—the homogenous, mass-produced, visual backdrop to which popular culture and contemporary marketing conform. These are images we do not usually actively notice, instead we read and consume them unthinkingly within the fabric of our everyday lives. Images of family are part of the fabric of this wallpaper of ubiquitous visual culture, ‘stock’ representations of family which are deployed as illustrations in all manner of discursive locations. Google does not shape our attention but is shaped by what we want to find, and as such it reveals the taste of the public which engages with it. As such, Google results could be considered a mirror for the tastes, values, sentiments, and curiosities of the mass public—or at the very least, what continues to be sold to the mass public in reflection of their assumed tastes, values, sentiments and curiosities.

The particular grid of a system of knowledge consists of 1050 squares of overexposed photographic material, displayed in a 25x42 grid. Each column correlates to a Google Images search term drawn from the language of academic family studies:

Adopted Family, Alternative Family, Australian Family, Blended Family, Broken Home, Conjugal Family, Divorced Family, Dysfunctional Family, Extended Family, Family, Family Man, Family Values, Father, Fatherless, Fictional Family, Foster Family, Gay Family, Gay Parents, Grandparent Family, Happy Family, Hollywood Family, Intact Family, Lesbian Parents, Matriarchal Family, Modern Family, Mother, Multi-generational Family, Normal Family, Nuclear Family, Patriarchal Family, Political Family, Same-Sex Parents, Separated Family, Single Father, Single Mother, Single Parent, Standard Family, Step Family, The Family, TV Family, Typical Family and Unhappy Family.

The first 25 images from each search are recorded within the accompanying work Index with image-to-text description of each result provided in the Receipts to the right of the grid. Receipts collates the linguistic description of each of the 1050 images, as generated by an open AI image-to-text reader. The idiosyncrasies of the AI reveal the biases which have informed its intelligence, with it often failing to recognise families outside of the most normative representations.