the search

[stephan_e_perez]

Archive of my recent performance

Some technical notes for you:

-The space viewport used in the performance was a website run locally.
-It uses the Google Programmable Search Engine API to get the words.*
-The 3D is done in ThreeJs.
-The website audio (the console beep-boops and the low ship-hum) is also done in JS using the native Audio API

[TheFrugalGamer]

Very cool! That is an interesting subject for study, and something I tried to do similarly for the Fuck Capitalism Jam over at Itch.io. Instead, I was trying to showcase, or spur thinking about, systems that weren't capitalism, but I ended up abandoning the idea because I couldn't get the mechanics to work in an engaging way. I'd like to revisit it sometime in the future if I can do a better job of getting what was in my head out onto a page.

If you ever upload the webpage you were showcasing there, I'd love to see it.

[stephan_e_perez]

Very cool! That is an interesting subject for study, and something I tried to do similarly for the Fuck Capitalism Jam over at Itch.io. Instead, I was trying to showcase, or spur thinking about, systems that weren't capitalism, but I ended up abandoning the idea because I couldn't get the mechanics to work in an engaging way. I'd like to revisit it sometime in the future if I can do a better job of getting what was in my head out onto a page.

If you ever upload the webpage you were showcasing there, I'd love to see it.

Hey, thanks for your reply.

You know, I'm thinking of doing a sequel to this performance sometime and capitalism is one of the subjects I've considered...

The website would need a bit more polish before I upload it... ...as is, it's mostly just useful for someone who knows how to use it (and there were some bugs in the live performance, as the video shows). I do have another web artwork that uses speech2text and a search API: show me the world, though that one has a much more playful aesthetic. I'm also wondering how to make use of search engines in internet art going forward - I previously used the Bing API for show me the world, but when that was discontinued earlier this year I had to switch it to Google PSE for that as well. And of course, Google will start charging me as soon as any of the sites reaches a degree of popularity... but still, all of that might be preferable to trying to build a search engine myself...  but yeah, I'll let you know if I do.

[Marziponder]

Hi Stephan! I watched the whole performance, here are my thoughts:

I really like the idea of showing search engine results in 3D, especially with the outer space theme. I think it emphasizes how vast the internet is, and how people can really *search* hidden corners and obscure places in addition to big popular places. It's so easy now to think that there's only those first ten results, arranged linearly in order on a page. But doing it scattered in 3D kind of rejects the ranking algorithm paradigm (at least a little bit). On my personal site, I also like to "theme" the internet as being an ephemeral space structure. I think it's cool that it isn't even too far off the from the reality either. A lot of the internet really IS beamed around the (low) atmosphere in the form of wifi. So I think the theme is great and very suited to the source data - websites.

I think that even without the description from your post or site, I would have understood the significance of the Star Trek "sub-theme" of space. The internet is vast, and by nature of being vast, it holds hard-to-find places and all sorts of data, and therefore it has an intrinsically subversive quality because it is a good place to hide things. That subversiveness makes it a vehicle for counterculture, as long as you have the ability to explore it effectively. And this is essentially the same motif as the Enterprise exploring vastly different cultures and places. I really like this observation! I mean, obviously Star Trek is about dealing with other cultures and was often a lens to examine relevant issues at the time. But I had never really thought that the setting of space itself might be a reflection of the newfound vastness and interconnection of the world that began to take shape in the 50s and onwards. As it became possible to learn and interact with so many different places and people, the world grew to the point that you would never be able to see and know them all - thus making even our Earth effectively as vast as outer space from the standpoint of a single person. And then of course the internet only amplifies that a million fold. So this gave me a new angle of understanding some of the latent, maybe even subconscious meaning behind Star Trek. Very cool!

Okay, so now for the interview. Honestly, at first I thought the language barrier was awkward and dragged things out too long. But then as time went on I started to change my mind on it and decided it was one of the best parts of the performance. In the same way that the Enterprise crew has a 45-minute struggle of some sort each episode, that needs to be overcome with their tenacity or ingenuity, you two had a language barrier that needed to be overcome through tenacity, patience, and empathy. It was great seeing how she would try to take turns and decide when to interrupt or not. It conveyed the relative importance of her thoughts to her. And to me, it showed how REALLY understanding another culture is not something that you can do simply and effortlessly. I think if you have done the interview in Japanese and then subtitled it, or if you had interviewed someone with really masterful English (although her skills were still impressive - "phenomenon" is a slick vocab word), or if your video call connection had been less laggy, I think it would have actually made less of an impact. We see professionally translated cultural educational materials all the time. But this was a raw and difficult interaction, which also reinforced the subversiveness. It was great to see a Japanese person speak critically and frankly about the establishment, e.g when she said nobody actually cares about the news of the emperor's daughter's school choice. The zeitgeist tells us that Japanese people are crazily demure, uncritical, worshipful of tradition, etc. But of course the reality is that they are just normal humans like everyone, and some of them are none of those things. She was very human in her interview, not "Japanese", only human. It was a good interview.


As for technical constraints, I haven't worked with the Google search API, but if you want to do theme-specific projects, you could maybe retrieve 10,000 or so results and save them locally and then just bundle that data file with the project. Then you'd have no API usage on the production side, only in the dev environment as a one-time setup. You could perhaps theme this as exploring the "monarchy nebula" or something to explain why you can't just find results for anything. You would still need some kind of algor5to search your locally cached results, but I don't think that would be too crazy to make and you could probably even find a library to do that part.