Search Results

by John Daniel Walsh

Search Results (excerpt), 2002, 3m 11s
This was a result of my prior experiments with chance compositions. I wanted to find a way to create a video that was ever-evolving, constantly surprising me with an endless amount of material that I had never seen before. It dawned on me that I could do this with the Internet, by creating a computer program that would download images from a disk based on text queries that a user could type in. It was essentially a search engine that existed outside the window of a corporate browser, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.

I began typing in single words and eventually gave the software longer lines of text. I liked this, because the more words it had to "represent" the more inconsistent the results were. It made apparent the futility of an algorithm trying to represent our understanding of words. It also served as a sort of "state of the internet", that is, a portrait of a society that uses the Internet. Half of this society is native English-speaking people, and 78% of all websites are in English.

I chose the Beach Boys song partly because of it's canonized nature in the world of pop music (I think many of us have heard this song by now), and partly because of it's vague innocence – it was written in a time long before the internet, and long before the rapid-fire pace of information that accompanies it.


Search Results