Rhizome | Blog Posts tagged "Google"

Distorted Scans in Google Books

joanne mcneil | Tue Aug 2nd, 2011 12:26 p.m.

"Could there be a fitter representation of copyright's contemporary plight than the fingers of a Google technician obscuring Kant's defense of writer's rights? An author's consent, Kant cautions in a footnote, 'can by no means be presumed because he has already given it exclusively to another', yet Google is struggling to effect exactly this sort of transfer of consent today, as it attempts to win approval for a legal settlement in the United States that will allow it to republish works whose copyright owners have not come forward. I couldn't have read Kant's essay so easily without the Google technician's labour - in fact, without Google, I might not have got around to reading it at all - but her fingers were nonetheless in the way. The internet's attitude toward Kant's words is ambiguous, combining respect, appropriation, liberation and accidental vandalism," Caleb Crain once wrote, having discovered a spectral-seeming hand, while conducting research for his review of Adrian Johns's Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. (The page has been rescanned, but the image is still on Nicholas Carr's blog.)

Wohlgemeynte Gedanken über den Dannemarks-Gesundbrunnen by Johan Gottschalk Wallerius is scarcely recognizable as a book with hundreds of distorted pages. (via Waxy.)

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Search Beyond Text

joanne mcneil | Tue Jul 26th, 2011 10:21 a.m.

Google Fellow/software engineer Amit Singhal writes about the challenges inherent to searching for images in an essay for Google's Think Quarterly corporate webzine:

At Google, when we talk about organizing the world’s information, we don’t mean only text; images and videos contain a wealth of information. In the early days, this type of content simply didn’t exist online. Now, through efforts like Google Earth and Street View, we can provide something incredibly valuable: images of your physical world.

However, in many ways, getting visual information online is the easy part. What’s hard is understanding that information. Unlike text, we cannot simply read an image or video. We have to look inside them, dig out the pixels and translate them into something meaningful. For a long time, we considered this a pipe dream, but by combining search methodology and technological breakthroughs in computer vision, today we can match pictures at a visual level. Search for ‘Mount Rushmore’ on Google and our algorithms will analyze many factors, such as the shape and texture that produces a good image of Mount Rushmore, then return those images to you in striking full-color.

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Thumbnail Video of Archive Team Google Videos Project

joanne mcneil | Mon May 2nd, 2011 4:53 p.m.

Google Video Scraping Thumbnails by Perfinion

Video consists of one frame of each of the videos saved by a member of the Archive Team (via Nic Alderton.)

Google Videos content is no longer available for playback. The company has migrated videos to YouTube, after originally announcing on April 15th that users would be responsible for immediate content backup pending deletion. The Archive Team, lead by Jason Scott (textfiles), worked to download as many videos as possible in the meantime. Here's a recent interview with Scott on the CBC radio program Spark.

via upcoming Seven on Seven participant Andy Baio.

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High Five (2011) - Niko Princen

Ceci Moss | Thu Mar 31st, 2011 10 a.m.

Originally via today and tomorrow

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Highways Connect and Divide

Natalie Saltiel | Tue Mar 8th, 2011 noon

JODI, GEOGOO, 2008-2011 ongoing, screenshot. (From Foxy Productions)

“Highways Connect and Divide,” an exhibition on display at Foxy Productions featuring work by Cory Arcangel, Tauba Auerbach, Bureau of Inverse Technology, I/O/D, JODI, Nam June Paik, Sterling Ruby, and Kerry Tribe, considers how the structure of information influences its transmission, reception, and legitimacy. Using the highway as a metaphor, the show constructs a dialog concerning the geography of transmission and the role of the artist in reimagining the systems that impact our lives.

Nam June Paik & Jud Yalkut, Beatles Electroniques, 1966-7. (Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.)

Highways, or channels of transmission are playfully interrupted in Nam June Paik's pioneering work Beatles Electroniques (1966-1972), where a TV broadcast of the Beatles’ A Hard Day's Night (1964) is disrupted by a magnet, rendering the familiar images into abstractions that reveal the underlying technological structure of the electronic signal. In a similar vein, though nearly forty years later, JODI's Geo Goo (2008-2011, ongoing) obstructs Google maps with failures and errors, stripping it of functionality and turning the ordered maps into chaos. The result is a disorienting and emphatic challenge to the technology’s authority and power. In both works, the technological architecture is given precedence over the intended distribution of content.

Kerry Tribe, North is West / South is East, 2001 (Photo: Mark Woods)

Maps are also the subject of Kerry Tribe's work North is West / South is East (2001), where the geography of Los Angeles is redrawn from memory by random individuals approached at the LAX Airport. The resulting maps, framed and mounted on the gallery wall, elevate the personal and unique realities over the legitimate cartographic version. Legitimacy and authorization are challenged further by Bureau of Inverse Technology's (BIT) video Bit Plane (1997), where ...

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Sphere and Similar Images (2010) - Jeff Thompson

Natalie Saltiel | Mon Mar 7th, 2011 1:30 p.m.

Google image search for "sphere", then "similar images" search under the original. All 400 images are shown in order at two frames each.

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Paintings for Satellites (2009-2010) - Molly Dilworth

Ceci Moss | Fri Feb 25th, 2011 2 p.m.

In the last year my practice has grown out of the studio in the form of large-scale rooftop paintings for Google Earth. This project uses materials from the waste stream (discarded house paint) to mark a physical presence in digital space.

My work is generally concerned with human perception of current conditions; the Paintings for Satellites are specifically concerned with the effects of the digital on our physical bodies.

All my work begins a series of rules derived from existing conditions. For example, the color palette for the rooftop paintings is made from the discarded paint available on a given day; the physical surface of the roof determines the shape of the painting.

As this project proliferates, it will take two forms - a community model, using local volunteers and paint from the waste stream and a design/build model, using solar-reflective paint, solar panels and green roofing contractors.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S DESCRIPTION

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Required Reading: Ever-Changing Chains of Work: An Interview with Constant Dullaart by Franz Thalmair

Ceci Moss | Thu Feb 17th, 2011 noon

For Constant Dullaart the Internet serves as a medium as well as a subject of artistic production. His main strategy is the exploration of the multifaceted languages of contemporary images circulating on the Internet and their re-contextualisation as found material in a medium of its own. With his artworks, the Amsterdam- and Berlin-based artist digs deeply into the caches of a networked cultural production without limiting the medium to simple technological traits: the default style of Web-based platforms, their widespread and often unscrutinised use as well as the popularity of globally standardised interfaces are manipulated with the aim of investigating their social potential.

Dullaart’s practice ranges from art made with and for self-explanatory domain names such as The Revolving Internet.com or The Sleeping Internet.com and video works such as YouTube as a Subject as well as the adoption of this series of short loops for the real space under the title YouTube as a Sculpture. Furthermore, he deals with site-specific installations such as Multi-Channel Video Installation, where projector mounts where borrowed from art institutions and taken to an exhibition space to serve as sculptural elements, as well as dealing with digitally manipulated images as in the series No Sunshine, where he applies the Photoshop default techniques to remove the sun from romantic sunset pictures found on Flickr. Brian Droitcour writes for Art in America magazine: “Dullaart’s ready-mades demonstrate his interest in what might be called ‘default’ style—the bland tables of sans serif text and soulless stock photography that frame ads for some of the most common search terms (auto insurance, cheap airline tickets, pornography), baring the underbelly of the Internet’s popular use.” . . . and the circle is turning and turning and turning—with no end in sight.

-- Excerpt from "Ever-Changing Chains of Work: An Interview ...