“Instead of…blaming online espionage and underhanded tricks by our competitors courtesy of mercenary Chinese computer hackers, we at aberrant are willing to take some of the blame…”

The aberrant Appeal

There must be something rotten in the online state of Internet search engines. Type “V&A” and “aberrant” into Google and aberrant architecture occupies every search result on the first page bar the final entry - an obituary in The Times for Barbara Morris, a former curator at the museum.

However, just type in “V&A” and aberrant architecture doesn’t feature anywhere in the sixty pages of results that our Google search spat out. To add insult to injury, a trawl through these results reveals a link on page 17 to a website called www.bonkers.co.uk, a ‘crazy’ gift website which sells V&A-themed tool set kits for the home and garden; on page 22 there is a link to an Indian-based recruitment website, which is currently advertising for a V&A (voice and accent) coach to work in a call centre in Hyderabad - if anyone is interested; and on page 38, below bonkers and the Indian voice coaching, there is a link to www.disabilityartsonline.org, a worthy website which should also feature higher up the list. Clearly, this is wrong and the cause must be routed out at once. But instead of falling back on the usual get out clauses, such as blaming online espionage and underhanded tricks by our competitors courtesy of mercenary Chinese computer hackers, we at aberrant are willing to take some of the blame for our shoddy online presence.

Thus far, we have been using this blog for good. It has been a mouthpiece for the workshops that aberrant has been running at the V&A as well as the general good deeds that we have been doing to get the kids off the streets and into the V&A. For four months we have been documenting aberrant architecture’s educational initiatives and selfless philanthropy, when all the while we should have been packing this blog full of the right meta-words to get our name, aberrant architecture, and our website, www.aberrantarchitecture.com, onto the list of Google results. Since we are on week 19 of our residency, we think it is about time that this startling aberration is brought to an end. And as not much else has been happening in the studio this week (besides a visit from Nick Grace from the rapid prototyping department at the RCA, Dr Irena Murray, the Director of the British Architectural Library and the Sir Banister Fletcher Librarian, and writer, Falcon B. Mews), it is actually proving quite convenient to dedicate this blog entry to pure self-serving evil.

The evil plan is to include the words ‘aberrant’ and ‘V&A’ sufficient times to earn ourselves a debut on the backend of the sixty pages of ‘V&A’ Google results. We only need page 58 or 59, because from that position we can plot our gradual Rocky Balboa-style underdog ascent up the charts by the brazen manipulation of key words and predictable search parameters. Towards the end of our residency this might mean we have to repeatedly write out ‘aberrant architecture/V&A’ in the blog like a delinquent Victorian schoolboy chalking his lines on a blackboard, but if we can’t leapfrog the Indian recruitment website by week 26, our Ivan Drago if you will, then everyone at aberrant will see our entire six months at the V&A as nothing short of a dismal failure.

Therefore, we need you to lend a hand. Please help us raise our profile by donating five minutes of your workday to typing ‘V&A’ and ‘aberrant’ into Google a few times. We can’t promise you a pin badge at the end of all this, but in exchange for the time you might otherwise have spent in the toilet trying to beat your highest score at ‘Brickbreaker’, you could be making a few people at aberrant architecture moderately happy. Plus, we promise to take www.disabilityartsonline.org with us all the way to the top of page 22. It’s not quite Bob Geldoff and Midge Ure, but together, typing ‘aberrant architecture’ and ‘V&A’ into Google can really make a difference!