God's Browser

Work in progress NL, 2010
Generative interactive installation

V_01 Developed at Baltan Laboraties
Distributed by V2_Agency
Programmer: Carlo Prelz

Generative interactive installation with projector, projection screen, theremin, computer, and custom software.

God's Browser is a generative interactive installation that features a film whose every frame is an image taken from the Internet. Specially developed image recognition software sorts images available on the World Wide Web and places them in sequence, resulting in a generative film made up of thousands of online images.

'God's Browser (first version)' was shown in a church at Mul's solo exhibition for winning the Art and Technology award 2010. In 'God's Browser', Geert Mul reflects on the Internet as a repository of innumerable terabytes of information, an archive (or dump) of users' knowledge, thoughts, daily experiences, desires and fears. In Gods Browser Mul sees the millions of on‐line photographs as the scattered frames of a movie. The internet is for him a universe of dispersed stills which can be put back in the 'right' order, reconstructing the movie. God's Browser is thus a generative and interactive installation that features this movie whose every frame is an image taken from the Internet. The essence of the movie / animation medium is that every frame differs a little from the preceding frame and when we play these frames at a speed of eight frames a second we perceive motion. Specially developed image recognition software sorts images available on the World Wide Web and places them in a sequence, resulting in a more or less abstract generative film. Thus instead of making a film the usual way, Geert Mul selects by means of software thousands of internet images as frames for an abstract generative film. On top of this, visitors can interact with God's Browser and influence the 'narrative' by using the Theremin connected to the installation. The visitor interacts by changing the speed of the film and zooming in and out. The film as a medium becomes deconstructed when images are displayed at a slower rate, and the figurative becomes abstract when an image is zoomed in to the level of one single pixel. The movie‐soundtrack is also generated with the image recognition software, which assigns similar notes to images that resemble each other.

Past Post Modernism: Not an universal image, but an universe of images:

Never before in history have more images been produced than in today's modern society. Never before have history images been as easily accessible as they are now. 'The Internet' is playing an important part in this process. It invites people to produce images because it's so easy to publish and share them. The Internet has evolved from a textual environment (who can still remember that?) to a visual environment where an almost endless amount of images and photographs are stored: a universe of images. The idea of the Internet as an endless library of images was the subject of an earlier interactive work by Geert Mul when the interactive installation: 'The Library of Babel' interactive installation (2003) utilised vast amounts of its images. Further experiments with image analyses software resulted in a series of works, such as 'The Match of the Day', and the image‐book 'Match Maker' (2005). The obsession addressed in these two works, is to formally construct or compute something we call 'content'. That what we consider to be the essence of all arts and philosophy is now the product of a machine.

Geert Mul 2010

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• generative
• interactive
• art
• new
• media
• image
• recognition
• pattern
• computer
• vision