The proliferation of the search engine magnifies Sontag's "flattening of reality" introduced in her seminal work, "On Photography." Now you can search for a nearly endless assortment of popular images that are placed in context with one another based on crowd sourcing without any consideration of aesthetics or meaning.
Perhaps the search engine's task may be seen as attempting to answer the question: "what does the crowd think is the best visual representation of a given word?" But I wonder; just because a lot of people click on sexy images from American Apparel ads, should they be included in an image search for the word, "American?" The fact that they are included, may imply meanings that Google never intended to reveal.
This research began by making simple line drawings in Microsoft Paint. Given my desire to find ways to combine photographic with "handmade" material, I decided to do image searches and combine the results with the line drawings. Since there are over one million words in the English language and each search results in hundreds of images, the possibilites are endless.
As such, the Google Search project is my effort to stand out from the crowd while freely borrowing from it, and humbly accepting that in our digital age "originality" may be an anachronism.
