Google Image Telephone

I have always loved the game Telephone. I remember playing it as a kid, and now that I have my own children we sometimes play it together, although recent rounds have degenerated into a competition for creative cuss phrases. Which isn't so fun. But the roots of the game still appeal, I think because they show that even the most orderly transformations are inevitably unpredictable. When order results in chaos or vice versa, I'm generally all over that.

Telephone Booth, NYC, 1963, Lee Friedlander
Lately I've been experimenting with Google Image Telephone. This is like Telephone except instead of whispering in your neighbor's ear you upload a photograph into Google's Image Search engine. When Google attempts to identify the image (usually successfully) it also returns 7 or 8 visually similar images. You choose whichever looks most interesting, re-enter it into Google Image Search, and the process repeats. After 10 or 12 cycles, the original message has usually been thoroughly scrambled. That's Google Image Telephone. It's sort of a silly game but strangely addictive.

Here's an example. I started with a photo from Bill Miller's Ruined Polaroid series.

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12 rounds later the image looks nothing like the original.


So what does "visually similar" mean exactly? Only Google's proprietary search algorithms know for sure. As far as I can tell Google looks to match shapes, pattern, color cast, and sometimes meta information such as authorship. In the initial images above the search treated the white Polaroid border as part of the image, returning only images with white borders. On top of all that search results change over time. A search for an image one day might return different results a few days later. So generally it's very mysterious. When you upload a new image you're never sure what's going to come out the other end. It's far less predictable than TinEye, whose search function maintains such fealty to the original that little evolution is possible.

Google Image Telephone doesn't work as well with famous photos. When you input a well known image, it's as likely to return other photos by the photographer as something "visually similar". For example this Eggleston photo,


Returns other images by Eggleston, not necessarily farm animals.


But a search based on a generic photo with similar subject matter,


Reliably turns up other farm animal photos.


What's the exact algorithm? Only Google knows.

One way to get around the famous photographer vortex is to use a lesser known image. I've been enamored lately with Stephen Shore's Amarillo Postcards —I'm making a similar series based on Eugene— so I thought it would be fun to feed one into the Telephone engine. Although it recognized Shore as the author, all of the matches were non-Shore photos.

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Not that far from where we started, although I couldn't get Shore's image to come up in the search.


The two image chains above show different possibilities for the game. One method is to deliberately choose dissimilar images, to see how far removed one can get from the original. The other angle, as shown in the Shore example, is to venture far from the original image and then attempt to link back to it. Or perhaps it could be a game for two with photographs emailed to a partner who would conduct a search, then return a new image. Or an email chain with multiple participants, a sort of Google Exquisite corpse. There are all sorts of ways you can go.