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She Made Ads. Then She Made Art Out of Them

How Sara Cwynar became one of her generation’s sharpest critics of the algorithm age

She Made Ads. Then She Made Art Out of Them

How Sara Cwynar became one of her generation’s sharpest critics of the algorithm age

Published 6:30, AUGUST 14, 2026

In 1927, the gravely ill German art historian Aby Warburg began constructing dozens of burlap-laced wooden panels, each devoted to a different theme in the history of Western culture. They ranged from “Astrology and mythology: projections of the cosmos” to “Superlatives of the language of gestures.” To each, he pinned photographs, diagrams, sketches, and other miscellanea, juxtaposing images across centuries.

Warburg was close to death, and so, too, he may have sensed, was the order he was trying to document. He wanted to synthesize the entire cultural history of the West. He called the project the Mnemosyne Atlas, after the Greek goddess of memory. When he died in 1929, he had completed sixty-three panels and assembled nearly a thousand images, with plans for even more.

When the Vancouver-born, Brooklyn-based artist Sara Cwynar first saw the project, she thought of it as a kind of “proto–Google image search,” she tells me. Cwynar—whose photographs, films, and installations are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the National Gallery of Canada—decided to update Warburg’s project for the algorithm era, using search terms popular at the time she was making the work.

The resulting installation, Alpha/Alphabet (2025/26), consists of around two dozen black panels propped up on wooden planks, where Cwynar elucidates terms like “Apple,” “Bank,” and “Climate.” These are everyday words whose........

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