This video installation project uses Google’s “autocomplete” function with open-ended questions such as “why does”,”why won’t”,”where is”,”how big”,”how small”,”when will”,”where can”,”who is”,”how do”, and “is there”. The results of these searches are the aggregate of all searches that have ever been made using these terms. These “autocomplete” terms float around the screen like fish food for animated and programmatic “animals”. It runs on an endless loop– as the animals eat the text, more search terms appear.

Search engines embody the collective mind of whoever has looked up anything on Google… and these animals eat that mind!

I showed this project at the “Venice Lights” art festival in Venice, California, in January of 2012.

This uses some animation elements from some OpenProcessing sketches, and I ended up taking the whole thing into Eclipse for ease of coding. As it turns out, Eclipse is great for coding but keeping Processing elements working correctly in the JAVA wrapper is a little bit tricky. Got it to work with a lot of code cleanup, however. And it was the first time I did multi-threading in JAVA!

I also showed this project at the LPM festival in Rome, Italy in May of 2012. LVX TV did an interview with me outside the space, where it almost seems as if words come out of my mouth that make sense.