From image to data: a historiography tracer

Image Tracer v1.7 launched

Trace: a mark or line left by something that has passed…

The Image Tracer is a collaborative project between Tsila Hassine and De Geuzen. It evolved out of our interests in media images and the way their significance and presence fluctuate in the ecology of the world wide web. Currently, in its beta phase, the Tracer is a research tool that archives Google image searches for the purposes of tracking their url, appearance, disappearance and rank.

Image Tracer v1.7 is featured in Jordon Crandall’s Under Fire, a project that looks at the organization and representation of violence. This edition of Under Fire (September 8 – October 7, 2006, Chicago, USA) is curated by Ryan Griffis.

Instant Media: Cargo Workshop

September 2005 | Oostende, Belgium

Historiography Tracer was launched with an intensive three-day lab. Participants made presentations and generally mapped out potential areas of exploration. If you want to read about some of the issues addressed, view a tour of the workshop here. This thread was developed in the context of Cargo Instant Media workshops and was made possible by financial support of the Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds.

An encounter with an image

Renee Turner

I teach first year art students and frequently in between lessons, during my lunch break, I watch the news on my computer. This time, the BBC World News header was followed by the story of a young Palestinian school girl, Iman Darweesh Al Hams, who was shot by Israeli Defense Forces on October 05, 2004.

My first encounter with her image was here: 

Tracer output test

At http://www.geuzen.org/ariel_sharon.html you'll find a page testing out what the output from the tracer script might look like. This page is based on a two month image search for Ariel Sharon.
Caution! The page contains over 800 large size images and loads very slowly. If a prompt for a password pops up, just click "cancel" and continue browsing.

Virtual tour through lab one

Historiography Tracer: Lab 01, Beau Site, Oostende, Belgium, Sept. 23-25, 2005

Here you will find a follow-up report in the form of a virtual tour through the workshops and accompanying bios of participants.

Take a virtual tour and read about contributions to the workshop

Media Mutations 2.1/Media Bomb

Layers of operation

Todd Matsumoto

'In the information age, he complained to senators, “people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.'

(Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the Senate Panel Hearings)

Saved / Linked

Femke Snelting

Networked portraits such as this one fade as their ingredients move from server to server over time. While dispersed image files are duplicated, manipulated, renamed and trashed, the caleidoscopic picture slowly but surely changes. On this page you will find a very simple sketch testing out how that erosion could be made visible.

Lost in data

Nadia Palliser

“What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of things. It is disparity.”

Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche Genealogy, History” Language, Counter-memory, Practice, p 142 

Image tracer software

Tsila Hassine

The World Wide Web has grown too big for our limited human capabilities, all of us web surfers experience this on a daily basis when we type a query into any of the search engines, and try to fish out some information among all the results presented to us by the search engine....

Image Tracer: Download + Manual

[Beta version]

This Image Tracer tracks the image URLs found through Google Image Search and documents changes over time. The script checks whether images are still available, whether they have changed in rank (i.e. do they show up higher or lower in the Google image result list?) and whether new ones were added. Unlike Google image search, The Image Tracer meticulously archives the history of any image search you decide to track, and might help you find patterns and significant changes that would otherwise remain invisible.