Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1 on Vimeo

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by Sebastian Schmieg

1 month ago

3. Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1

by Sebastian Schmieg

1 month ago

2. 81 Points of View | With Introduction

by Sebastian Schmieg

5 months ago

1. 81 Points of View

by Sebastian Schmieg

11 months ago

sebastianschmieg.com/searchbyimage

search by image, recursively
starting with a transparent png (400×225px)
2951 images, 12fps
december 9th, 2011
netherlands

Sebastian Schmieg, 2011

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more videos: vimeo.com/user9934287

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(I disabled the download because the video provided by Vimeo as a download is of very poor quality. Just contact me if you want to have the video file)

Credits

935 Likes

Sean Leow
3 hours ago
Seth Tisue
8 hours ago
Tod Robbins
10 hours ago
unodos
11 hours ago
Florian Jenett
21 hours ago
THE BLUE_RAYS
21 hours ago
Riley Post
1 day ago
TRIANGULATION BLOG
1 day ago
Joe Spiteri
1 day ago
Krystian Jones
1 day ago

Tags

Evelyn Eastmond 1 month ago

amazing
Kyle McDonald 1 month ago

i really like the various "morphing black objects". and the section where it's just graphs dancing around is amazing.

i'm surprised in all those searches you never ended up in a loop, where the top result was an image you already saw? or in that case, did you just choose the next-highest image?
Zacheray Long 1 month ago

I agree! There were some really cool unintentional motion graphics moments.
Sebastian Schmieg 1 month ago

kyle, if the image has been used before, I choose the next-highest. otherwise it would indeed loop pretty quickly, or even end up bouncing back and forth between two images.
acffh morst 1 month ago

Aha, thanks for clarifying that. Great vid, thanks for posting!
Kyle McDonald 1 month ago

that totally explains it :) thanks for clarifying. i really enjoyed this piece.
Bryan V. 1 month ago

And that's how all life came into being.
Moritz Stefaner 1 month ago

Crazy stuff, I could watch this forever.
Tedb0t 1 month ago

An excellent example of local minima and gradient descent: the search algorithm settles on accurate results for a period of time until it's forced to change, and then small differences project the search path into a completely new trajectory, and the cycle repeats.
th0ma5 1 month ago

really dig this! big fan of mass dump split editing like this
blunt 1 month ago

I like to imagine that this is what the world looks like to a computer sat in a basement somewhere, trying to work us out, and becoming slowly sentient :) Lovely work, just lovely.
Tristan Naramore 1 month ago

exactly my thoughts.
Jason Levine 1 month ago

that was pretty much the entire story of the universe.
Stu Rob 1 month ago

Agree with Blunt. It's very easy to see this as a emergent consciousness trying to figure out the world thru the information on the internet.
Larry Lucio 1 month ago

Thanks
Pamela 1 month ago

What a brilliant idea, and equally brilliant result. Chaos and emergence....
Steve Copley 1 month ago

Are you sure you didn't just mine the images from my browser cache?
Aaron Benscoter 1 month ago

simply amazing. truly makes an effect.
Anson Burtch 1 month ago

Very cool experient. Visually stunning. Well done!
Antonio M. Rosario 1 month ago

Wow. Brilliant.
Mark Healey 1 month ago

Awesome, found this via Boing Boing
thiflyingtomato 1 month ago

1:00 MINECRAFT!!!!
Taylor Hokanson 1 month ago

Good work! I'll be showing this in my digital media class in Chicago.
Vuk Cosic 1 month ago

Grandiosity, my most official respect for this!
Tim Posch 1 month ago

Great work, highlights the emergence of complexity from simple rules quite nicely.
.. 1 month ago

Fascinating video, did you choose the first image in each search result?
Craig Parkes 1 month ago

How do you determine where you are going to stop the search or how many images you use in each animation?
Bradley Gregory 1 month ago

Seeing the ragetoons pop up made me smile.
Jordan Barnes-Crouse 1 month ago

Like watching a Google stream of consciousness.
Jordan Fish 1 month ago

this could go on forever, and i'd watch it.
tamimat 1 month ago

This is art. Seeing it in the MOMA
cwseet 1 month ago

pretty interesting idea. at the end of it all on full screen, I kinda feel like I Neo. "woww.....i know kung fu."
Paul T Carney 1 month ago

Good meditation on our pattern-needing minds . . . and master class in why logos matter. Design-fu can be a weapon used for good or evil . . . .
Sebastian Schmieg 1 month ago

hey, thanks everybody!
Ellz Ramclam 1 month ago

I don't get it :(
BoldBoyFilms 1 month ago

well done on the huff post mention!
Kai Clear 1 month ago

Great idea ^_^ very nicely done
dkm news 1 month ago

...invisible...made visible...and even more...nice work!
Joshua Clarke 1 month ago

Somebody has too much time on their hands, but I respect that! :)
Alexander Chen 1 month ago

Really great.
Tristan Naramore 1 month ago

I'm inspired to score a soundtrack for this.
Nik. 1 month ago

There was no cat in there! ;)
eric socolofsky 3 weeks ago

sounds like a bug. sebastian??
M Plummer-Fernandez 1 month ago

Great piece of work. I could imagine this going on infinitely with a few clever lines of code.
cym 1 month ago

Very nice work!
Do you add each image and url by hand to the movie?
Or do you use some script for it?
Sebastian Schmieg 1 month ago

Thanks.

No, the video wasn't created manually. I guess that would take forever. I wrote a script to scrape the images and then to compile the video. So it's all done automatically.

At the bottom of the project's page, you can find the code to scrape Google's Search by Image feature. It's written in Python.
Geert Mul 1 month ago

yes interesting !
looks almost identical like this !

vimeo.com/28007339
Geert Mul 1 month ago

or the interactive version ;-)

vimeo.com/30741611
Geert Mul 1 month ago

or the live version ;-)

vimeo.com/30853200
Bartholomäus Traubeck 1 month ago

awesome work sebastian, love the fact that you start with a transparent image.
@gert muul: saw your god's browser in amsterdam two weeks ago, a very nice piece, especially the interactive touch with the theremin makes it interesting.
Geert Mul 1 month ago

thanx ! more to come... :-)
Anthony Antonellis 1 month ago

dont stop! i need several more hours of this until i know everything there is to know