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onewordmovie is NetArt Project an Installation by by Beat Brogle & Philippe Zimmermann since 2003

CONCEPT: Onewordmovie is an on-line platform which organizes, based on user-supplied terms, the flood of images on the Internet into an animated film. A word turns into images, images turn into a movie.
Using a specially programmed search engine, users can call up images from the Internet which match their search term. The project's search engine is built on top of the most popular image search facilities available on the Internet (e.g. Google) Supplied with a search term, the engine produces first a «hit list». This list can be several thousand images long, depending on the term. The images on this «hit list» provide the «raw material» for the movie. Following the ranking on the «hit list», the images are animated into a film in real-time, following a fixed and predetermined score, which consists of a series of interwoven loops.

Each film has an individual trailer, displaying the search term as the title and each film lasts until the «raw material» is used up.This project plays with the tension between on-line and cinematic approaches to images. What images are associated with what words? "One Word Movie" reveals a glimpse into the "collective psychology" of online cultures by showing patterns of word-image associations, as created by millions of people around the world.
The Experience So Far: Over the last Years Onewordmovie has been shown as an installation in Museuns and Media Arts Centers around the Wold and, in an adapted version, online. What became evident during that time and across the venues is the intuitive character of the work. People from diverse backgrounds, some with, many without any experience with media arts, took up the offer enthusiastically and had films generated based on their own keywords. The work is so self-explanatory that people needed no guidance. Entering a term and hitting return poses no challenge at all. Yet, the results fascinated people, many spent a long time with «One Word Movie», even looking on as others entered their search term. Indeed, one of the important aspects of Onewordmovie is the social interaction among the viewers in a public setting. In the often surprising films, the juxtapositioning of images creates rich fields of associations, random and meaningful at the same time.

Idea: Beat Brogle |
Code: Philippe Zimmermann and Stephan Görgens | Conzept & Text: Beat Brogle und Felix Stalder

Online Version hosted by hek Basel Switzerland

Financed by Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt , Aargauer Kuratorium , sitemapping.ch,
pro helvetia

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
by Brogle/Zimmermann.

Thanks for help and support: Reinhard Storz xcult | Annette Schindler/Wolfgang Hockenjos, [plug.in]
Urs Brogle, Philipp Gasser, Olof Kühnholz, Markus Schwander, Felix Stalder, Tweaklab / Hanspeter Giuliani, FAct /Micheal Connor, Knut&silvy, Monica Studer & Chritoph van den Berg: Hotel Vue des Alpes