visually similar imgs by Rebecca Lieberman

visually similar imgs (ongoing book series)

visually similar imgs draws its source material and subject matter (as well as its name) from Google’s “Search by Image,” a search product released in 2012 that allows people to search with images instead of written queries; feeding banal images through the search (selfies, cat photos, family snapshots, porn) maps color, pixel density, and other formal elements to create a proliferation of new images that are ‘visually similar.’ I am particularly interested in the seams and failures of this search product – in those moments where an image of a hand becomes pictures of rifles and an old man’s bald head, or some digital noise on a black square is transmuted into the texture of a dress or a night sky.

visually similar imgs is my reflection on the poetics of search. It encompasses an ongoing series of artists books, animated GIFs, video projections, and a browser-based art work. visually similar imgs is an investigation of how digital images move through the internet wilderness; how they are morphed, aggregated, mutated, repossessed, collected, emptied of their contents, and reinvested with new kinds of meaning. I am interested in transforming these images into visual simile, in making the internet’s detritus becomes expressive, its own kind of concrete poetry.

visually similar imgs (girls on white)