Tuesday, January 13, 2009

My Internet Quiz Mosaic

On one of my scheduled breaks from reading boring papers (I find the only way I can focus at all on this boring-ass work is to allow myself scheduled breaks throughout the day), I came across another one of those random internet quiz things that so often gets passed around like a 2-litre bottle of cheap cider in a flophouse. This one, however, intrigued me, because it isn't just a simple question-and-answer affair. The instructions, instead, are as follows:
* Type your answers to each of the following questions below into Flickr Search
* Using only the first page, pick an image
* Copy and paste each of the URLs into the mosaic maker
  1. What is your first name?
  2. What is your favorite food?
  3. What high school did you go to?
  4. What is your favorite colour?
  5. Who is your celebrity crush?
  6. Dream vacation?
  7. Favourite drink?
  8. Favourite dessert?
  9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
  10. What do you love most in life?
  11. One word to describe you.
  12. Your Flickr name.

Yeah, it's cheesy and silly, but there are some truly impressive shots on Flickr, and I have always been somewhat fascinated by photography, so I gave it a whirl. This is my result (click for full size):



Here are my answers (can you guess each one?):
  1. Dan
  2. Steak
  3. Parkside
  4. Blue
  5. Claire Danes
  6. Road Trip Across Asia
  7. Single-Malt Scotch
  8. Chocolate Fudge Cake
  9. Successful
  10. Sex
  11. Kickass
  12. Prometheus-Titan

Some thoughts on it:
  • Who has a favourite colour once they pass the age of 8? I went with blue just to be totally unoriginal, but I honestly couldn't tell you what my favourite colour is.
  • It's interesting to me to see how little correlation there is between my search term and some of the returned results. Specifically: steak giving my someone's leg, the road trip one giving me a snake, sex showing me a bridge in New York and "successful" giving me a shot of a locomotive. I didn't really explore why, but I am somewhat curious where these came from. Flickr tags? Titles? Comments?
  • Some of the photos are absolutely brilliant. I've recently stumbled upon the idea of HDR photography. The locomotive is definitely HDR and I suspect the leg, New York (edit: yes it is, just checked the photo name) and city-at-night shots are as well.
  • I think this really shows some of the promise of the massively over-hyped Web 2.0, the interactive, user-generated content iteration of the web. There's an amazing breadth and depth of photography on Flickr, all there for the searching and enjoyment of the users, all free. And with that comes the chance to create derivative works-to remix and redisplay the content in other ways that are artistic, or meaningful or whatever. I'm over-analysing it obviously, but I do think this is a microcosm for this trend of the participatory internet.
Anyway, here's the credits for the artists whose photos appeared in my mosaic. I'd love to see what any of you who read this might come up with.

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