That Image Search. Images as Poetry or Flarf

I’ve been reading Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things; an essay collection worth your time and one that is as interesting as it is well-written—not an easy feat to accomplish. In one of his essays he speaks about searching by images [1]. Believe it or not, I did not know that this was possible (or not widely available), even if I knew that image recognition had come a long way.

Used this Image to Search

So I used the above image to see what would come up, and it correctly identified me as someone standing.

The first set of images it returns are people standing, of course.

The second set was a little more standing up than just standing and had some protest movements and faceoffs between people and State power.

It was a little interesting to see what other images Google came up with. And a little like flarf, it stretched the imagination to see that my standing with my dog, as bourgeois an act as is possible, could conjure images of people standing up to State power and powers that attack people, or dogs that attack people for State power.

Of course, the algorithm is not perfect and if the image directly above, the collage, that is, is recycled into the search, it says we are looking at trees. Which, though…