Online Images - An Archive of Cultural Memory @essayisticretrievalsystem-blog - Tumblr Blog

Above, you can see photos of a part of the three little books we made.

The first photos shows the front of the booklet. The second photo is a part of the lyrics visualized in Flickr, the third in Google Images and the fourth in Picasa.

There's a clear distinction between the Google Images result and the Flickr and Picasa result. The pictures from Google Images are much more 'logical' and expected, while we often can't see the link between the image and the word in Flickr and Picasa.

Also, because internet users can add as many tags as they like to an image, the same image often appears while you type in different words.

In our opinion, Picasa and Flickr give the most surprising results but Google Images give the most consistent results.

Presentation 16th of January:

Theory and thoughts...

Online Images - An Archive of Personal and Collective Memory Objects

After our latest feedback session our project took a slightly different turn, which caused that we had to change the name of the project. As you can see on the blog, we changed the title into: ‘Online Images, an Archive of Cultural Memory’. The full name of the project however, which was to long to use as a title on Tumblr, is 'Online images - An archive of personal and collective memory objects'.

In this post I will explicate our motivation and the theoretical fascinations preceding this study. In order to structure our thoughts I will use four steps.

1. The shift from a static and hierarchic database towards a more dynamic and democratic web database.

As we told already during our previous presentations: One of our starting points was our curiosity towards the shift from a static and hierarchic database (from before the web 2.0) towards a more dynamic and democratic database. And with the latter we point to the web 2.0 and thereby the user-generated content.

2. The Tension between keywords and the object stored in the online database.

Our next starting point was also discussed during the latest feedback session. That is the tension between keywords and the object stored in the online database. Because Internet users label their own pictures and images (via tags or filenames) the link between image and label can become less universal and thus more arbitrary. On the other hand, the “label-object” relation can become closer to truth. Or, let’s say, maybe more commonly accepted. Because users from all over the word are (in greater or lesser extent) able to contribute to the keyword- object relation.

Thinking about on the one hand personal and on the other hand universal strategies of labeling object in cyber space, we started to think about the tension between personal associations with objects and universal, or lets say cultural, conventional associations with an object.

3. Our memory as a three folded Archive: Our brains, the media around us and the cultural conventions.

This brought us first of all to the theory of Jose van Dijck about personal memories of the past. In 'Mediated Memories in the Digital Age’ (2007), José van Dijck (a professor in Media en Culture) writes about how media and the human memory can NOT be seen as two separated things for they always influence each other. To explain (and simplify) her theory we can have a look at personal photographs: By looking at a photograph (the medium) your personal memory of the depicted moment influences the meaning of the photograph. But the photograph does also influences what and how one remembers the depicted moment of the past. Moreover, it affects what you remember and what you forget. This, because the moments that are not depicted on the photograph are less likely to be remembered. A personal memory object, in our case a photograph, could even create new memories about that moment that, back in time, maybe never really existed.

In addition to this, van Dijck also explains that what we remember is strongly effected by cultural conventions: For example, in Western culture we like to make photos of babies walking for the first time in their lives. So it is likely that we remember this specific moment in time.

So, we can conclude that our memory is partly stored in our brain, partly in media objects and is affected by cultural conventions.

We can link this to The Archive project as follows: Our memory can be seen as a three folded Archive: Our mind, the media around us, and the cultural conventions. The interrelation between these factors, are responsible for what and how we remember the past.

4. A cross point of personal and collective memories/associations.

Van Dijck’s theory is mainly based on personal memories of the past. Also there also exist something as Collective memories. Collective memories can be defined as the shared memories of a community or culture. Collective memories nowadays exist for the greater part out of mass media. Think about all the images and video’s we saw of ‘9/11’. This is now part of Collective memories. Due to new media technologies and the web 2.0 the collective memory is rapidly growing. There is also not a clear border between personal and collective memory for they also influence each other. Also, personal memories can become collective memories (think about hits on YouTube or Flickr).

In conclusion:

We can link all these thoughts to our project about the archive: The act of remembering is not so different from the act of labelling objects in an online database. By tags, filenames, links, image prescriptions (etc.) we link the object with what we remember of the object. These references can be based on personal associations, but also on cultural conventions. Also, they can be objective or subjective. Taking this all into consideration, we could look at the collection of online public accessible images (with all their meta-data) as part of our cultural memory archive. Or maybe better, as a visualisation of the effective factors of our cultural memory archive: A cross point of personal associations, collective associations and the intertwined relation between the media and our minds.

Used source: Dijck, Jose Van, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, Stanford (Stanford University Press), 2007

As written on the blog (Language of images - concrete and abstract words) a couple of weeks before, we decided to work with the song text Solitude is Bliss from the band Tame Impala. Why this song? Mainly because we where interested in how words and sentences that are difficult to visualise would be translated via the search engines ont he internet into images.

For now, you can listen to the music and read the lyrics... soon the visual translation of the song will be posted on the blog!

Lyrics Tame Impala - Solitude Is Bliss

Cracks in the pavement underneath my shoe I care less and less about and less about you No one else around to look at me So I can look at my shadow as much as I please All the kicks that I can't compare to Making friends like they're all supposed to You will never come close to how I feel (x2) Space around me where my soul can breathe I've got body that my mind can leave Nothing else matters, I don't care what I miss Company's okay Solitude is bliss There's a party in my head and no one is invited And you will never come close to how I feel (x2) Movement doesn't flow Quite like it does when I'm alone I'll be the one who's free You and all your friends Can watch me, today Don't ask me how you're supposed to feel You will never come close to how I feel (x4 fade out)

Related projects

Google book

(http://crapisgood.com/2012/05/google-book/)

The two Englisch artists/desingers Ben West & Felix Heyes made 'Google book'. They replaces all 21000 words of the British dictionary by it's first representative of Google Image. The book consists of 1240 pages of JPGs, GIFs and PNG,s in alphabetical order.

The artists used two PHP scripts. The first script translated the words into images. The second script was in charge of the layout, it organized the pictures into columns and exported the document into a PDF file.

Google Image Labeler

Google Image Labeler was a feature, in the form of a game, of Google Image Search that allowed the user to label random images to help improve the quality of Google's image search results. It was online from 2006 to 2011. (wikipedia)

The Image Language

(http://writewithimages.com/)

Santiago Luna Lupo (an Argentinean Copywriter) and Mihail Aleksandrov (a Brazilian Art Director) created an online visual experiment called 'The Image Language' which explores the possibilities between words and images. Users can type in any sentence, and the online program will translate the words into images. Every word is replaced by the first image that Google Image shows.

One can choose to save his or her own images. The saved images are stored on the site. All visitors can look through the images, and by placing the cursor over the image, one can read what the image means.

Google’s Search by Image

(http://support.google.com/images/answer/1325808?hl=en&ref_topic=25176)

Google’s Search by Image is a search engine that uses images as keywords. One can discover all sorts of content that’s related to a specific image by putting the image URL into the search box.

Experiment 3:

Translation method:

Database: Google images Settings: regular Keyword strategy: one word Selecting strategy: first picture

Nothing else matters I don’t care what I miss

Experiment 2:

Translation method:

Database: Flickr Settings: regular Keyword strategy: one word Selecting strategy: first picture

Nothing else matters I don’t care what I miss

Experiment 1:

Translating the following sentence into images: Nothing else matters I don’t care what I miss

Translation method:

Database: Picasa Settings: regular Keyword strategy: one word. Selecting strategy: first picture

Keyword: Nothing

Prescription: by +Justin Moore There's nothing like hanging your 5D out the window of your car first thing in the morning. This took a few takes to say the least but it was really fun to do. Shot at 1/30 second at f/22 with my EF 17-40 f/4 on my 5D Mk I.

Seen: 13336572

Likes: 326

Keyword: else

Prescription: We went over to the Mansion of Prince Gong as it is meant to be an excellent example of a Qing dynasty mansion and a great way to see into the lifestyle of Imperial China's elite. The only problem was that everyone else seemed to have has the same idea. It was absolutely rammed! So after having my picture taken with some Chinese kids (seemed to get asked that a lot by their parents) and a quick look around, we were ready to go. Still managed to grab this shot as some some tea was being taken into a building. Ironically, this was the closest I got to a tea ceremony whilst in China!!! (You'll have to read my Shanghai photo blog to understand that one :-))

Seen: 130968

Likes: 3

Keyword: metters

Prescription: Agoseris Retrorsa or Spearleaf Agoseris (common name) I wish to express my sincere thanks to the "Picasa team" for putting my photo on the big stage... I would also like to thank and express my appreciation to all of my friends for taking the time and trouble to view my photos and inspiring me to take more and more good photos... No words are enough to say thanks to my family as they have always been supportive to me in all matters and because of them every thing is possible ... and the image is dedicated to the love of my life "Gitanjali “ THANKS EVERY ONE :)

Seen: 4646889

Likes: 176

Keyword: I

Prescription: I made this B&W edit following some friendly advice. The original was in color, this was taken in the bridge that surrounds the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In said bridge they have a system that releases a lot of steam every half and hour, I don't know what is the purpose of this, I guess its ornamental. So I was waiting for someone to walk by and suddenly all this steam comes off and this lady pulls out her umbrella and goes through the fog, when I saw the quickview of the photo in the back of my camera I got really excited, I thought to myself "this might be a good pic"

Seen: 18755596

Likes: 687

Keyword: don’t

Prescription: -

Seen: -

Liked: -

Keyword: care

Prescription: WE SELL UGG SNOW,UGG BOOT,UGG WARN,UGG LEATHER,UGG,UGG,UGG,UGG,UGG,UGG,UGG,UGG,UGG,UGG,UGG,UGG,UGG, UGG,UGG,UGG,UGG, UGG,UGG, UGG,UGG, UGG,UGG, UGG,UGG, BOOTS,UGG CASUALS BOOTS,UGG SLIPPERS,UGG OUTERWEAR,UGG BAGS,UGG ACCESSORIES,MEN UGG,UGG MEN,UGG KIDS,KIDS UGG,UGG BIG KIDS,UGG LITTLE KIDS,UGG INFANTS,UGG CARE PRODUCTS,UGG MEN'S HADDON,UGG MEN'S HERRICK,UGG MEN'S RISEBROOK,UGG WOMEN'S ROSABELLA,UGG WOMEN'S ABBIE,UGG WOMEN'S LYNNEA,UGG WOMEN'S VIVICA,UGG KID'S CLASSIC,UGG CLASSIC TALL ,UGG BAILEY BUTTON TRIPLET,UGG BOOTS,UGG Australia BOOTS,UGG BOOTS,UGG BOOT,UGG SLIPPERS,UGG BOOTS,UGG CASUALS BOOTS,UGG SLIPPERS,UGG OUTERWEAR,UGG BAGS,UGG ACCESSORIES,MEN UGG,UGG MEN,UGG KIDS, msn/email:[email protected] ;[email protected],yahoo: [email protected] ,skype:fashionhouse2010,website: http://www.eur-wear.com

Seen: 344031

Liked: 1810

Keyword: what

Prescription: Glittering-throated Emerald - Amazilia fimbriata - http://www.ronald-gruijters.com/

Seen: 24492096

Liked: 817

Keyword: I

Prescription: I made this B&W edit following some friendly advice. The original was in color, this was taken in the bridge that surrounds the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In said bridge they have a system that releases a lot of steam every half and hour, I don't know what is the purpose of this, I guess its ornamental. So I was waiting for someone to walk by and suddenly all this steam comes off and this lady pulls out her umbrella and goes through the fog, when I saw the quickview of the photo in the back of my camera I got really excited, I thought to myself "this might be a good pic"

Seen: 18755596

Likes: 687

Keyword: Miss

Prescription: -

Seen: 3011606

Liked: 191

Conclusion: The word-image relation is quit arbitrary. The words we used - Nothing else matters I don’t care what I miss - do have multiple meanings and/or are hard to visualise because they do not refere to something we can see. Therefore it's hard to capture words in an image. Because we did not use any nouns we did not expect the image to relate very closely to the meaning of the image. Nevertheless, we discovered that using a noun as keyword does not necessarily mean that the search result in Picasa represents the noun: Here are two examples:

Keyword: Apple

Keyword: Book

But as expected there are some image-word relations that are less arbitrary. Here are two examples:

Keyword: Earth

Keyword: Table

Interesting Academic Articles

Zwol van, Roelof, Diversifying Image Search with User Generated Content, Barcelona, Spain, 2008

ABSTRACT

#Zwol

Language of images - concrete and abstract words

To start our experiment we decided to use a a few phrases from the song Solitude is Bliss by Tame Impala. Solitude and bliss are two abstract words while for example tree and potato are two concrete words. We found it interesting to use a text/phrase consisting of both concrete and abstract words, we think this will give us a more interesting outcome than, let's say, a text containing only concrete words because abstract concepts are less obvious to be captured into a singe image.

Nothing else matters I don't care what I miss Company's okay Solitude is bliss There's a party in my head and no one is invited

We will translate this text in different languages, use it in different online databases and always use the same selecting strategy.

How to start our visual experiment?

At the 21st of November we presented the very first ideas about our artistic visual experiment which one can read below (in the two latest blog posts).During our presentation we received feedback on the fact that we have to take into account how Google operates. This is an important aspect since the operating system of Google is determinative for our search results.With this in minds we started thinking about materializing the experiment.

What are we doing? We decided to write a short narrative. But instead of words we will use images to tell the sorry. By doing so we will shed light on the text-meaning relation, as well as on the notation-denotation relation.

Why? The shift from a static and hierarchic database (from before the web 2.0) towards a more dynamic and democratic database (due to the web 2.0) is one of our starting points. Our next starting point is the tension between keywords and the object stored in the online database. Because – with the web 2.0 and user generated content - Internet users labels their own pictures and images (via tags or filenames) the link between image and label can become less universal, more arbitrary, more democratic and so on. So the question we can ask ourselves is as follows: how arbitrary or conventional is the relation between tag/keyword and the image stored in the online database called the Internet now a day. We want to examine this through our artistic visual experiment.

How? In order to make this new language out of images, we need a translator that enables us to translate words or sentences into images in a consistent way. The translator will be an online search program like Google.

We still have a lot of questions concerning some practical issues: Our narrative can be a cliché sentence like we have showed in class-“Cinderella had two mean stepsisters’- or it can be a repertoire of words that are less common. It can be a text with a lot of difficult words and words with multiple meanings, or we can chose to work with one single sentence built up out of words that more ore less refer to one single element in the ‘real’. Which one will give us the most interesting visual results?

And in order to translate the written words into images in a consistent way we need also to think about the following questions: Do we want to work with one database or more databases (Google, Firefox, Flickr, icon databases etc.) and do we want to make a comparison? Do we want to write only in English or is it interesting to compare English sentences with the Dutch variant? Do we want to tell the same narrative all the time? Do we want to work on two computers on two different geographical places (Flanders and Holland? Do we always choose the first picture that will appear? Or do we use the picture that relates closest to the meaning of the word we typed in? Or some other selection strategy?

We agreed on experimenting with different phrases, databases, languages, selecting strategies ect.. After this quick exploratory visual research we will observe and analyse the outcomes: What basic conclusions can we draw? And what outcomes do we find interesting to continue with? What can be our focus?

We will post some of our try-out narratives on the blog so one can see how the experiment proceeds.

Clarification of our goal: To conclude with, we do not want this visual artistic experiment to become an academic attest, rather an eye-opener or a critical reflexion on the subjective nature of the archive in general.

Fairytale

Onderzoek

Doordat internetgebruikers tegenwoordig (op het web 2.0) niet alleen zaken downloaden maar ook uploaden bepaalt de internetgebruiker mee de inhoud van het internet. Een manier waarop dit gebeurt is bijvoorbeeld door ‘tags’ aan een geüploade foto toe te kennen. Een tag is een (al dan niet relevant) sleutelwoord dat toegewezen wordt aan een digital bestand en zo aanvullende informatie geeft over het bestand waaraan het gekoppeld is. Door deze methode werkt iedere internetgebruiker mee aan een flexibeler ontsluitingssysteem dat niet afhankelijk is van voorgeprogrammeerde categorisatie.

Als een kritiek op het oude, statische ordeningssysteem willen wij het nieuwe, flexibelere systeem van web 2.0 onderzoeken. We gaan door middel van een visueel experiment onderzoeken in hoeverre tekst en afbeeldingen op het internet overeen komen. Om dit te doen gaan we dezelfde tekst binnen verschillende ordeningssystemen onderzoeken zoals bv. Flickr, google images, etc.

Research

Since internet users nowadays not only download but also upload stuff on the internet (on the web 2.0), they help decide the content of the internet.

This can be done by adding for example ‘tags’ to an image you upload. A tag is a keyword that is linked to a digital file and thus gives additional information about the linked file. By means of this method every internet user contributes to a more flexible retrieval system that doesn’t depend on pre-programmed categorization.

As a critique on the old, static retrieval systems we want to investigate the new, more flexible system of web 2.0. By means of a visual experiment we are going to investigate in how far text and images correspond to each other on the internet.

We are going to do research by using the same text in different retrieval systems like Flickr, Googl Images, Picasa,…

The Essayistic Retrieval System

The idea behind the project

(See the original text in Dutch below)

An archive is a place in which one or several objects are stored. In order to get an object out of the archive again, one needs a retrieval system. Such a system relies on the arranging and labelling of the objects within the archive. The labelling and arranging influence ones search results.

The analogue archive – and the archives from before the web 2.0 – is based on statistic and predetermined arrangements and retrieval methods. Therefor we could conclude that the pre-web 2.0 archives hierarchical. This, because the static predetermined retrieval system will effect your search results.

The relation between keyword and object, as discussed above, is not arbitrary but is based on conventional connotation between object and keywords. With other words, the labelling and arranging of information is based on existing general relations between object and word. Thus, one can retrieve the objects more easily.

Here is an example to illustrate this: If you are looking for a photo of a cabinet on the Internet, than the most likely keyword to use would be ‘cabinet’ or maybe ‘furniture’. This because the relation between 1.the word ‘cabinet’ and the 2. the actual cabinet is a conventional relation. It is less likely that you are going to search the internet with the keyword ‘ebony’. A cabinet can be made out of ebony wood, but it is not one of its conventional characteristics of a cabinet.

The relation between keyword and object can be compared with the relation between the real and the notation of the real: The extent to which the relation between these two are based on conventions, the more effective. Linking the write keywords with the objects is thus very important.

Nowadays, with the web 2.0, and hence the user generated content, the online archival system changed. Now, we are not only dependent on predetermined categorisations, keywords and search terms. But, by using the Internet, we can influence the online Archive. First of all we can contribute to the archive by writing and posting personable content on the Internet. Examples are Youtube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, etc. Secondly we influence our search results by adding tags, links, new keywords etc… to online object. And of course, Google remembers you interests and will use this information during your coming search session. This means that the Internet can bee seen as an accessible, dynamic, democratic (and in a way more personalised) archive.

The shift from a static and hierarchic database (from before the web 2.0) towards a more dynamic and democratic database (due to two the web 2.0) is one of our starting points.

Our next starting point is the tension between keywords and the object stored in the online database. Because Internet users labels their own pictures and images (via tags ore filenames) the link between image and label can become less universal. But on the other hand, the “label-object” relation can become closer to truth. This for example because a lot of people show on the Internet what there association is when looking to a specific image. If we see on the Internet that a lot of people call their picture of there birthday ‘beautiful times’ than this must be a good keyword for a picture of a birthday party. We can give a lot more examples but we for now we leave it here.

So the question we can ask ourselves is as follows: how arbitrary or conventional is the relation between tag/keyword and the image stored in the online database called the Internet nowadays. We want to examine this through an artistic visual experiment.

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