Felix Heyes and Benjamin West, of the collective King Zog’s, came up with the idea to manually collect the first results in Google Image Search for the 21,110 words of the Oxford English Pocket dictionary, as their final project for Saint Martins, the prestigious London art school. Then they turned it into a book. Oh, what long, absurd, sleepless nights they must have spent. And yet…
This month the publisher Jean Boîte will release 1000 prototype copies of this visual dictionary, Google Volume One. The editors David Desrimais and Mathieu Cénac created software that simultaneously collected the first occurrences of each word in Google Image Search, producing an inventory of Google’s visual representation of words at a single time. Search results on Google change constantly, and the second volume will simply be this one’s twin brother. (This edition differs from the prototype produced by the two students two years ago.)
