Media Art

Online search engines are some of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence programs in existence. iAltar is an artistic tribute to these programs. 

Given billions of websites and billions of queries per second, the online programs are constantly learning both the grammar and the common idioms for finding the desired results. By sending them random queries the results are often oblique and surprising as the search program tries to intuit the original intention of a query that has no intention.   

iAltar constructs and transmits an online image search query using two random selections from a word list comprising over 58,000 words (http://www.mieliestronk.com/wordlist.html), displaying the results by distributing the images to an array of three or more independent Raspberry Pi computers connected to display screens. The search text is displayed to show the current search. A musical background is constructed by using a series of sound event threads. Each thread chooses an event at random, plays it back at a randomly assigned speeds, and intersperses it with with a random length of silence. The spoken voice track of  for the current search query is constructed by retrieving a sound file from google voice.