How does an image become a referent? In what way do the photos of works of art mediate the spectator’s experience? What is the place of images in the construction of artistic discourses? Can the debate on the original and the copy be re-defined today?

Influencer is a series that invites us to re-think the operation of reproductions of works of art and their weight within history, theory, and artistic consumption. From pure bibliographical research applied to images (or what is the same, adopting a research methodology that is limited to the academic, textual, and iconic) Influencer, collects, as a file, the repetition of different photographs of the Bicycle Wheel by Marcel Duchamp in numerous books. For this, the sources are consulted from intuition since, although it may seem implausible, there is no way to know if an image is reproduced in a book before being glimpsed. Thus, it has been necessary to meticulously review the books to confirm or discard that the image was reproduced.

The libraries and search engines do not index the images; only the textual content of the bibliographic sources and the investigation processes are limited to the words. This project turns the dynamic around from exclusively looking for images and building meaning from them. After this research process, a polyptych has been generated, in which paradoxically, the repetition of an image makes this piece unique; its uniqueness is a direct consequence of its diversity. A duality is already present in the chosen piece, Bicycle Wheel, which is no

more than a replica since the original 1913 piece has not been preserved. It is a circular game that brings us closer to the bibliographical than the visual and is disturbingly contemporary. Despite being reproduced and distributed in books that serve the logic of visual distribution of the twentieth century, the final piece is a mosaic that reveals itself

closer to a Google search than an analog file.