my algorithm

Inside the logic of the search engine we are presented with a very new kind of writing instrument. Though I am not sure we can call it writing, it does present to us, something to be read. Something, I suggest  we are uncertain how to read. One of the reasons for this, is that we're not familiar with its sense making. 

Search often pulls in very disparate things. And more so with images. With images it reads meta-tags and keywords assigned to a picture, when it has them, its location of origin, its pixel qualities, hue, color, size, etc. It may eventually show you the picture in its context, which simply means showing us the 'page' the picture was sourced from. 

In the world of search, images and words appear as pure quantities, with a very narrow spectrum of qualities. One thing search is good at is finding correlation. 

The correlative is not a conditional statement.

It's more like, this seems to happen when this happens.

It's not necessary to understand the context in which it happened, but to see that this happened, alongside or when this other thing happens.

In other words, the correlative is not causal. 

In a sense, that's its brilliance. It's indifferent to why or how. 

It's not an admission that we don't know why or how. But more interestingly, that's not important. That's not the question. Here in fact, we are not asking questions.  

Search, as its name implies, wants to find things, and with that, other things and other things. It's very lateral.

This interest me as a concept, the concept of a composite and lateral photograph. Lateral narrative. You can think of search working in this way.

This is a new kind of narrative. A different way to narrativize. Yet we don't really know how to read or write this way. We still construct our narratives in the Aristotelean way. We write, and read, in the mode of, because this happens this happens, and because that happened, the next thing happens. 

Think of a search engine writing and spitting out all those results, algorithmically. In visual search, bringing together image packets.  There is no sense to a good number of image searches. Unlike text results that come in a list, images come in a cluster. Certainly there are algorithms with logic and, or,  conditional statements. It's like seeing all the images in the daily paper at once. But more so, all the images in all the papers, at once. All the images, that search can find. But not all, because you can't really look at them all. Imagine looking through a telescope into the vastness of the cosmos, never seeing the whole thing, just scanning here and there, and here, and then there. Each time bringing back this bit, and then this bit, and a bit of this, and that. Never seeing the cosmos. Just bits and pieces.

The algorithm, as narrator, has no subject position. It's not a subject trying to reckon with making sense of the world. There is no temperature in its telling or showing. There are only rules. It does not care what the images speak.  Things have no special meaning for an algorithm, they just have attributes. 

Storytellers have always cared. There are stakes in the telling of the tale and for the teller.

There is something profoundly beautiful and beguiling in the indifference of search, in the narrative of correlation. I wonder, how I might render sense to it. Or perhaps, here and there, in this bit and that, I can find a way, a sense, my algorithm.