Process: Google Sladdakavring

Been thinking of how to represent the Tongue Rug. Experimenting. Though it is decidedly ugly, if I flip the Google map upside down, the waypoints do look like some sort of makeshift sladdakavring.

Yet if I isolate the pattern, it does makes an interesting grouping albeit, spread out. Not sufficiently rug-like. More viral.

I’ve noticed that other tongue rugs are being created online. Individual tongues (blog postings) are starting to show up in search engines because of the tags. Dependent on the search criteria, the user has the potential to create their own Tongue Rug outside of my blog. I like the chance element in this process.

There is also another sort of tongue rug that is emerging, a pseudo tongue rug based on misleading tags. These “fake” sites dynamically load content into their pages by crawling the web for tags from blogs and YouTube. A sampling:

• bestof vidéos de A à Z
• cascapedia videos | TheGolfTv.com
• Magdalene videos - Online Adult Dating Free
• Whitefish, Ontario videos on TripAtlas.com
• Fireball Planet Free Videos Online - Top Videos - All Free Videos
• Gegevens van Julie – Wieowie
• Bonaventure - Cafe.hr
• laurentides videos - Global Videos
• Hybrid Cars - Hybrid Vehicles

Were it a person creating these sites, they would realize right away that the content does not match. As the machine cannot make the differentiation, the Tongue Rug videos are popping up in unrelated sites through a mash-up process — like Tzara’s paper bag poem. I find it amusing that a user visiting the dating site, or an avid golfer, will be puzzled by these videos of slow-moving landscapes. Will they try and make a connection? Will they investigate further or just shrug it off? I like the surprise element in the process.

So there are several Tongue Rugs in this project separate from my own experiments — the search engine rug, the mash-up rug. Rugs that grow of their own accord. A disquieting process as well as I have no control on which sites my “tongues” could potentially end up.