Following the thoughts after the dialogue with the artist, I started to investigate more about the search engine, internet and the unconsciously forced decision. Set the context into 3 parts: 1. Reverse image search VS Image search. 2. Visual literacy. 3. Internet geopolitics.
For the first topic, after investigating the basic theory of reverse image search engines, I made 9 similarly identical images. With the altered text in the right corner of the images, and put them on different platforms from China and the Western world. The text can be sequenced as a sentence, at that point, the expectation of this test is to get different results by using different reverse image search engines that would form varied sentences.
The results didn’t match the expectation, which lead to further research about how the engines work. Different engines have different algorithms which are classified and full of manipulation.
If using one’s portrait to put into the reverse image search, what the results will be? To determine a person accurately is highly related to the exposure, which hence to if that person is “famous” or not – the click-through rate of the webpage that includes that person. More clicks, more data storage.
It’s like playing chess or hide and seek with the algorithm. How individuals situate or vanish themselves in the cyber world.
The second part was I henced the visual literacy of human and machine reading images. How does an engine getting smarter? There is a google crowdsource game for people to play with, the aim for it is to help the algorhithm get smarter. The image resource they got was from flickr. People usually negelect the agreement details while they sign up an account on the website which leads to information leaking.
For the third part, from my shallow understanding, it is the policy instrument to take over the online discourse and governance through leading technology dominance between countries.
– How does it create barriers between varied internet ecosystems?
– How does it affect the searching results?
– How does it affect the communication of individuals?