Emilio Vavarella

While Google tries to built a perfect world through its services Google Earth and Street View they are still one of the great sources to get every kind of glitches. Emilio Vavarella has discovered hundred of these errors and spent a lot of time traveling on street view mode to create The Google Trilogy, three different projects using the same tool. 

"The series of 100 digital photos called Report a Problem is the first part of the project, it is about the relationship between humans, power and technological errors. “Report a Problem” is the message that appears at the bottom of the Google Street View screen, which allows viewers to report a problem during the viewing of the place they are virtually visiting: missing censorship, wrong colors, random appearances. I traveled on Google Street View photographing all the “wrong landscapes” I encountered before others could report the problems and prompt the company to adjust the images. Common landscapes are transformed by Google’s unexpected technical errors into something new." - Emilio Vavarella.  See more;

In this post are published some pictures from Report a Problem, see the entire series here and the other 2 pieces from the trilogy called Michele’s Story and The Driver and the Cameras here.

I'm Google by Dina Kelberman

Impressive research based works by Dina Kelberman. Im featuring one of her ongoing projects called "I'm Google" which presents a great organized image and video research by many different factors. But I highly recommend to check out also her other similar ongoing projects featuring a huge variety of imagery source such as found image, photographs, cartoons.. like the one at her start page called "smoke and fire" also presented at the New Museum as online exhibition.

"My work comes out of my natural tendency to spend long hours collecting and organizing imagery from the internet, television, and other commonplace surroundings of my everyday life. I make things as I am compelled to make them and consider why later, often making connections I didn’t consciously set out to realize. I gravitate towards things that are simple, colorful, industrial, and mundane. I am also interested in using materials that are easily accessible and familiar to the everyday person. My work elevates the familiar and transforms brief moments into infinite stretches of time. In close examination of the simple or the seemingly insignificant the viewer may bring their own limitless associations." - Dina Kelberman. See more;

I'm Google

http://dinakelberman.tumblr.com/

"I’m Google is an ongoing tumblr blog in which batches of images and videos that I cull from the internet are compiled into a long stream-of-consciousness. The batches move seamlessly from one subject to the next based on similarities in form, composition, color, and theme. This results visually in a colorful grid that slowly changes as the viewer scrolls through it. Images of houses being demolished transition into images of buildings on fire, to forest fires, to billowing smoke, to geysers, to bursting fire hydrants, to fire hoses, to spools of thread. The site is constantly updated week after week, batch by batch, sometimes in bursts, sometimes very slowly.

The blog came out of my natural tendency to spend long hours obsessing over Google Image searches, collecting photos I found beautiful and storing them by theme. Often the images that interest me are of industrial or municipal materials or everyday photo snapshots. I do not select images or videos that appear to be intentionally artistic. Happily, the process of researching various themes in this way has lead to unintentionally learning about topics I might never have otherwise, including structural drying, bale feeders, B2P, VAWTs, screw turbines, the cleveland pack, and powder coating.

I feel that my experience wandering through Google Image Search and YouTube hunting for obscure information and encountering unexpected results is a very common one. My blog serves as a visual representation of this phenomenon. This ability to endlessly drift from one topic to the next is the inherently fascinating quality that makes the internet so amazing." - Dina Kelberman. 

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Kari Altmann

Kari Altmann's video pieces from the CORE SAMPLES series are based on an online research whose pictures present different round objects of the same or similar color and are animated through the morphing effect. Because of this effect the viewer keep mesmerized by following the red, black or white point with the view. 

Altmann started this project some years ago, back in 2008, but it is still an ongoing research and the videos are being updated as Kari finds more content to continue it. (You can see the updates on the comments of each video at vimeo, they have been recently updated btw). See more; 

Where is the Blood?, 2009 and Black Hole, 2008 are being part of the ongoing group exhibition at Seventeen Gallery here in London. I highly recommend to attend it and see other great works by Merce Cunningham, Harm van den Dorpel, Michael Guidetti, Oliver Laric, Mark Leckey, Sean Raspet, Emanuel Rossetti, Hito Steyerl and Artie Vierkant. The exhibition is titled "Motion" and curated by Ceci Moss and Tim Steer.

Where Is The Blood?, 2009

Black Hole, 2008

Cultivation

Search by image - Sebastian Schmieg

One of the latest works of Sebastian Schmieg is called "Search by image" the same name as the Google's feature which was launched last year and lets users search by image, and he used for this  project. Sebastian made different huge researches of images by using a recursive process, he started with one image, then search again with result from the previous search, and the same with the next result, etc. He wrote some scripts to make the process easier. Finally Sebastian presented the different searches through videos, displaying the images following the same order he did searching the images. 

In the first video below, into the  post, he started from a transparent png,  and then searching recursively for almost 3000 times. You can see more tests on his site. See more;

UPDATE (August 22, 2012): Sebastian Schmieg made an online-live version of Search by image >>>  http://sebastianschmieg.com/searchbyimage/live/. This live version documents a real-time-time recursive search that began with an empty, transparent image. Each image is chosen by Google's “search by image” algorithm as the one looking most similar to the previous image. Every time somebody is on the page, the recursive search continues. 

Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1

Starting with a transparent png (400×225px) 2951 images, 12fps

Similar Images, Associatively, Transparent GIF

Starting with a transparent "spacer" gif (50×50px) 677 images, 12fps