When Harun Farocki first claimed the term operational image, they were images that did not depict or represent, entertain or inform but rather track, navigate, activate, oversee, control, visualise, detect and identify. Operational images are instruments that perform tasks and carry out functions as part of an operation.
So no matter how an image is representational, when it is put in the reverse image search engine, it becomes mathematical data that was being read by a machine; it becomes an operational image as well. When importing the image and a descriptive word in the search box, the image became a shape, a container, and the words are used to associate with the most related and clicked links.
I chose a heart shape as the starting point because it is a developed idea to express love which is very representational of itself. By typing a question: The perfect heart shape. The first pop-up image was a tutorial video showing me how to draw a calculative perfect heart shape. I followed the instruction, drew it, and then typed the question: the best love poem. In the first link and the first poem, I chose and diced it into words and used them as descriptions with the perfect heart shape I drew to generate a bunch of results. Aline the visual results at the front and the URL links at the end, I tried to create a poetic outcome demonstrating how the reverse image search engine works. But the aspect of the generated results were mostly related to commercial use is missing and the image flow is a bit confusing since audience might took it as one generated from the previous one.
Without any notification, we passively upload our image to the cloud using the reverse image search engine. For around a week. So-called to make their products and services better. But still, we sacrifice our privacy to a certain level.
Interestingly, there have two steps to get totally different image results. When the google lens is more accurate but also more commercially related, the other function visually similar images are vice versa. We might not be able to know the working module under this algorithm, but the pattern evidence that there has precedence of the outcome, which is primarily related to commercial feeds.
Inspire by the video essay Seed, Image, Ground by Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka, they fabricate suface by operational images, using the seed bombard videos and commercial images together with military aeroplane scanning video. I took the melting ice cube as the metaphor of the data storage while using the reverse image search engine. Juxtaposing the visual results to create a playful image sequence and leaving the open interpretation about how search engine works with precedence.