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Wednesday, May 18, 2005
T to the Oogle
T to the Oogle
Hot on the tails of art hacks that borrow the big G's latter five letters, such as Cory Arcangel's "Doogle" (which turns any search into a hunt for all things Doogie Howser) and Tsila Hassine's "Schmoogle" (which upturns PageRank and sorts the results of any Google search at random), the trouble-making UK collective C6 has released "Toogle." Billed on their homepage as "comprehensive image buggery on the web," "Toogle" (the T stands for text) is a search mechanism that matches a search string with an ASCII imitation of the corresponding top-ranked image by Google Image Search. Popular searches--such as "Bush," "Sex" and "Lindsay Lohan"--generate text-based likenesses composed of the words that have summoned them. This automatic dictionary of words defined by their Google-endorsed visual counterparts (and vice versa) imprints one (text) so deeply into the other (image) as to leave both only faintly recognizable. A nice foil to the authoritative master of logical answers that is Google. - Kevin McGarry