I’m Google Turns Google Image Search Into a Beautiful Visual Experience

I’m Google is an interesting Tumblr blog started in 2011 by Baltimore-based artist Dina Kelberman. It’s a running blog collage comprising Google Image Search photographs and YouTube videos. Kelberman writes that the content is compiled into a “long stream-of-consciousness”: as you scroll down through the seemingly-never-ending flow of imagery, you’ll notice that the sections of similar images flow seamlessly from one to another based on form, composition, color, and theme.

Here’s a zoomed out view that gives a taste of what exploring the “stream-of-consciousness” is like:

Here’s what Kelberman has to say about the concept:

This results visually in a colorful grid that slowly changes as the viewer scrolls through it. Images of houses being demolished transition into images of buildings on fire, to forest fires, to billowing smoke, to geysers, to bursting fire hydrants, to fire hoses, to spools of thread. The site is constantly updated week after week, batch by batch, sometimes in bursts, sometimes very slowly.

The blog came out of my natural tendency to spend long hours obsessing over Google Image searches, collecting photos I found beautiful and storing them by theme. Often the images that interest me are of industrial or municipal materials or everyday photo snapshots. I do not select images or videos that appear to be intentionally artistic. Happily, the process of researching various themes in this way has lead to unintentionally learning about topics I might never have otherwise, including structural drying, bale feeders, B2P, VAWTs, screw turbines, the cleveland pack, and powder coating.

The photographs Kelberman gathers from Google Image Search lack proper attribution and links to their original sources, so the project is a bit iffy on the copyright side of things (something that may rub photographers the wrong way). Still, browsing through the flow of photographs is a novel visual experience that’s quite interesting to behold.

It’d be neat if photo sharing services on the Web offered this type of context-based random browsing through their exploration pages.

I’m Google [Tumblr via Colossal]