Found Connections

Blood And Strawberries: Colors Of The Web from Mark Sniadecki on Vimeo.

The internet presents us not only with collective knowledge, but a sense of collective perception. By this, I mean that the visual representation of an idea can become defined for the user by an averaging of the countless TIFFs, JPGs, and other image files that are tied to keywords--and Google Image Search may be the most frequently accessed channel of such perception. If I approached the concept of "blue" without ever having experienced it, what would the web convey to me? For "Blood And Strawberries" I entered simple, single-word search terms for each of the primary and secondary colors, in addition to black, white, and gray, then captured the resulting screens of image thumbnails just as they appeared. Experiencing the web is rarely a static exercise, however, so I have animated the final results to provide the sense of movement and flow one would encounter while browsing... and then some.

For the audio portion, I noted the opening sentences of the Wikipedia entry for each of these colors, then read them into the Songify app on my phone. The resulting song (unedited except for the fade out) is what scores and drives this piece along.