Albertine Meunier

Biography

Albertine Meunier is a French digital artist who has been working with so-called net art and digital media since 1998, making her one of the pioneering figures of the French internet art scene. She treats the Internet itself as a raw material, mining search engines, social platforms, and everyday online behavior for poetic, playful, and often sarcastic artistic statements. Rather than simply depicting the digital world, her installations, performances, and objects turn the infrastructure of the network, its data trails, interfaces, and rituals, into the subject and substance of the work itself. Meunier's best-known project, 'My Google Search History,' emerged after she discovered in 2006 that Google had quietly stored her entire personal search history. She responded by publishing years of her own searches as a public artwork, a gesture that anticipated widespread public concern over surveillance, data retention, and algorithmic memory long before it became a mainstream conversation. The project was exhibited at institutions including the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and it remains a touchstone example of art that uses personal data as raw creative material. Her more recent project 'Flood the Zone' extends this data-driven, media-critical practice into the era of generative AI, examining how the sheer volume of AI-generated content is reshaping notions of truth and authorship online. Since the emergence of blockchain-based art, Meunier has become an active participant in the NFT space, working not only as an artist but also as a collector, curator, and advisor and trainer within the cryptoart community, represented by galleries including Avant Galerie Vossen. Her ongoing series, released under names such as 'albertine' and 'albertine.tez,' apply her long-standing net art sensibility to the language of smart contracts and token-based collecting. Across more than two decades of practice, Albertine Meunier's work consistently asks what it means to live, search, and create inside networks that quietly remember everything.