“Read For Us… And Show Us The Pictures” by John Cayley, Daniel C. Howe delete/double

Title:

Read For Us… And Show Us The Pictures

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2015

Medium:

Mixed media installation, custom software

Artist Statement:

Founded on its earlier installation, “Read For Us” The Readers Project presents the work of a software entity that generates digital video montage, with visual content sourced through live image search. The Montage Reader – developed initially for English – analyses its text and first establishes a overall visual grammar based on closed-class words that underlie linguistic structure. The reader then searches for images corresponding to phrases – ‘longest common phrases’ whenever possible – finally composing a sequence of images that corresponds with the written language of the text both structurally and also semantically – at least in so far as contemporary image search proposes a correspondence that is meaningful for the human user-readers of network services and their aggregation of crowdsourced indexing. Texts read by the Montage Reader may include parts of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), and Some Thing We Are, a short story by Daniel C. Howe.