Googlology was my first collaboration with a digital algorithm.
Google Goggles was an image recognition and object identification app, available between 2010 and 2014. It promised the ability to take a picture of something and have the algorithm identify the subject, then provide information related to it. While nowadays Google Lens (which subsumed many of Goggles’ features) and other AI-based image recognition algorithms can often achieve this effectively, at the time, Goggles success rate was less impressive.
In practice, unless the picture contained something highly identifiable such as the logo of a global brand, or a famous landmark such as the Eiffel Tower, the app would simply return twelve images from the Google index, which it deemed to be similar. Since it could only analyse the images visually, this selection seemed to be based solely on colour and form; the pictures were divorced completely from their content or meaning in the completely democratic ‘eyes’ of Goggles. So a news image of a nuclear missile launch in Pakistan was analysed and presented next to a stock photo of a bottle of pills and a painting of a small boy wearing a blue hoodie. The resulting selection of images was wonderfully eclectic, and sometimes strangely moving in its fragmentary and multifarious glimpse of human culture.
Fascinated as I was by the ‘similar images’ when I first saw them, and particularly by those whose visual similarity was not immediately obvious, I had an urge to decipher the Goggles process as much as possible. So I decided to reverse-engineer the original image as closely as possible, as a collage from the resulting twelve ‘similar images’ that were presented when Goggles could not identify the subject of the picture.
I called the project Googlology because of its parallels with archaeology; both rely on sifting through a vast amount of material to unearth particular artefacts, which are then analysed for clues. Of course archaeology provides a picture of the past; googlology gives us only a piece of software’s perception of humanity.