Millenia as Moment: A Triptych in 75 Colorgrams by Comp-syn

In Millenia as Moment: A Triptych in 75 Colorgrams, Comp-syn showcases state-of-the-art computational methods for depicting how a city like Venice, as a collective entity, perceives itself overtime. Millenia as Moment consists of colorgrams, a unit of visualization invented by Comp-syn1 . Colorgrams are produced by aggregating hundreds of images using a mathematical representation of colorspace that is optimized to emulate human perception. In Millenia as Moment, each colorgram aggregates the top 100 images associated with a word in Google search results, such that the Triptych consists of 75 colorgrams (words) in total. Via the PageRank algorithm, Google's search results are adapted to large-scale patterns of search activity bound to a geographical IP address, which allows our method to identify cultural associations that emerge as a result of the decentralized information seeking activities of entire populations, akin to the dynamics of a city. First, we present a Triptych of 75 colorgrams imaging the past, present, and future of Venice using English search terms implemented from New York City. We then replicate this Triptych while composing each colorgram using the Italian translation of each word, searched from an IP in Venice. A goal of Millenia as Moment is to imagine how cities perceive, think, and experience as collective cognitive agents. For this reason, Millenia as Moment resists linear reading. Color and shape present cognitive trails on which the viewer's mind is led, but not always to a logical destination. The words provide a map, though not always a reliable one, just as the maps of a city evolve through the Odysseus ship of its political inhabitants. An experience of meaning lies in the ineffable space between the words, images, and their arrangement, much like the identity of the city hangs ineffably between its people and its innumerable structures, spatial, temporal, and conceptual.