Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Found Connections: Google's Row



I like the term "intelligent design."  NOTE: I'm not going to go all religious here, nor am I going to intend any insult whatsoever, but I've always been amused by the notion of creation.  So, without getting to deep now, I decided to let the Internet "create" something for me.  I took the lyrics of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and had google find a visual representation of each word for me.  Whatever it returned as the first image, I used.  Period.  The results were as I expected, but it was interesting to see it in action.  Both simple and specific words returned both relevant and seemingly arbitrary images.  I wasn't necessarily surprised that the word "down" returned the image of a child with down syndrome, however given cultural sensitivities, a traditionally created piece would most likely not include this image.  The only things I did to augment this piece was to scale the images to a matching frame (oddly enough, it only had to happen with 4 images with roughly 90-75% down-scaling, interesting... maybe it says something about a favorable image size on the Internet, but I'm getting off topic now) and I set the elapsing time of the image sequences to match the timing of the actual song's lyrics (another interesting point; the association of the rhythm of the song seems to lend itself to quicker recognition of what's going on here).  I'm not sure what else to say other than that it makes me want to try to get inside of the "mind of Google" and try to figure out exactly why these images were chosen.  Is it purely the result of search coding or rather a matter of popularity via human consensus?  My theory is that it is an amalgamation of the two, but that is probably just the tip of the iceberg.  I've rambled on long enough.  See what you see and experience what you experience, and if the moment strikes you, leave a comment of your thoughts!

A bit of clarification: As this applies more directly to "found connections", I'm letting Google's image search database "find" random images for me to "connect" in such a manner as to create an abstracted visual metaphor for "Row, Row, Row Your Boat."

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