Beat Brogle / Philippe Zimmermann
onewordmovie

Beat Brogle and Philippe Zimmermann have developed software for their participatory Web art onewordmovie that – via a connection to a common Web browser such as Netscape or Internet Explorer – compiles all pictures linked under a search term into one film. This gives rise to Web-based film sequences that enable an artistic access to user-determined Internet content, which in turn can give concrete information about political and social conditions within the real world, since the images are listed according to their position in the search hit list. For example, the search term “I” yields mostly images of white men.

Though word, still and moving images coexist in the Net, the means of accessing the information contained in these media formats is almost exclusively text based. Since no one has yet succeeded in programming a search function that can analyze images, the software accesses keywords from the meta-text of the images, such as file names or text data in the image area. The resulting errors that creep in are indicative of the – at least so far – unmatchable complexity of the iconic autonomy.

(Text: Bettina Back)