86400

About

A real-time film composed of images that show up in a Google Image Search for the exact time at that moment (e.g. 11:41:14). The film plays in real-time, and takes a full day to watch.

Images do not necessarily bear a relationship to each other, besides a similar metadata tag. Thus, it is the audience who read meaning into the assemblage of images, creating stories and hypotheses about the images.

The images were gathered using the Google Image Search API, using masked IP addresses so that a search would appear to be from a random global location. As an unconnected string of images, the film forms a visceral snapshot of the US-indexed internet in late 2015.

This piece is a digital homage to Christian Marcklay’s The Clock (2010).

Video: ten minutes of 86400, at 22:00:00

Viewer version

A limited edition of ten specially-made film viewers is available to purchase (they also function as clocks); please contact me for details

Process

More information about the development of this project can be found in Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis.