Google Image Telephone

A few days ago, there was an interesting post on B, a really great photo blog you should all be reading. It was about using Google's image search to play a game of Telephone (you know, that game where you whisper a phrase into someone's ear, they repeat it to someone else, and so on, to see how the phrase gets changed). On Google image search, you can upload a photo, and it finds images it 'thinks' are similar.
I tried with a couple of my photos. This one first:

Of the 'similar' images it returned, here are the three I found most interesting:

The top one was my favorite, so I fed that one to Google, and picked my two favorite results:

Again, the first one was my favorite, so I did one more round. Here's my favorite from round three:

The Google search engine is obviously picking up on the red/orange tones in the original photo and using that to match images. I decided to try a black and white photo:

And picked these three as my favorite matches:

The top one was my favorite, so like with the color photos,  I fed that one to Google, and picked my two favorite results:

One more round, using the first of those two photos, and my favorite is:

I learned two things from this. One, Google image search relies on color of images to find matches. Two,  B&W photos on the internet are cooler than color ones.

I do like the randomness in the matches, and how these unrelated images work together. Ultimately, however, it's a fun diversion, but not much more than that. It does give me some ideas. I want to convince some other artist friends to play along with something that could be fun. 

Wish You Were There

I'm going to be having an exhibition in the atrium showcases of the Fine and Performing Arts Center at Moraine Valley Community College. Titled Wish You Were There, it consiste of prints of vintage tourist postcards paired with Google street view images of the same location. The exhibit dates are Oct. 17-Nov. 10.  Click on the link above for more info.