July 21, 2002

10:34 PM

Here's a simple example of a potentially interesting art project. Fill a Usenet post with words specifically chosen to create art based on Google's search word highlighting. Not sure if it's art or spam, but I am waiting for the first ASCII artist to step up to the plate and do something complex like the Mona Lisa.
posted by willnot (10 comments total)

I recognize it as a cheap publicity/advertising stunt on the part of the poster. I probably shouldn't be adding publicity fuel to the fire, but it just seems too potentially cool not to mention it.

Any time you can mess with the system to create art, I'm all for that. Still, I'm not sure why the person felt the need to cross-post it to two newsgroups. Wouldn't one have done the trick?
posted by willnot at 10:39 PM on July 21, 2002

The cross post was probably to ensure retention and propagation, plus to be double plus sure that it got listed fairly high in google's search results.
posted by nathan_teske at 11:36 PM on July 21, 2002

Well, this is just obnoxious.
posted by WolfDaddy at 11:53 PM on July 21, 2002

He also did this landscape which looks lame, but is kind of amazing when you think about how he managed to get the exact colors to work with it. Really ingenius.
posted by geoff. at 12:16 AM on July 22, 2002

for sure, geoff. Seriously, how are those colors determined?

What an esoteric skill. value??
posted by razorwriter at 2:29 AM on July 22, 2002

Some people build ships in bottles, other people make ascii art (or in this case google art). I'm sure someone will create something more complex than these basic images in the future. Maybe a reworking of some scene from a famous movie using google?
posted by drezdn at 3:43 AM on July 22, 2002

The colors are determined like this, razorwriter.

Thanks for the wonderful find, willnot. I hope other folks run with it. But I'm not sure it's fair to call our ingenious inventor's posts a publicity stunt. Paul does seem to have a fixation on search rankings, but his joy in discovering "Google Groups art!" seems real enough.

Future historians of Primitive Internet Art will be sure to note Guy Macon's Keyword Spamming Experiment, which was apparently the spark for the Google Group discovery. You can actually watch Paul figure his new art form out over the past week or so.
posted by mediareport at 3:57 AM on July 22, 2002

Better list of colors (scroll down)
posted by mediareport at 4:04 AM on July 22, 2002

The landscape looks better like this.
posted by waxpancake at 8:38 AM on July 22, 2002

The second Google Groups masterpiece: Abraham Lincoln.

Search for these words in this order; click the first result:

aa ae ao ea ee eo oa oe lincoln
posted by mediareport at 9:03 PM on July 24, 2002