Venus of Google / Matthew Plummer-Fernandez

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is an artist exploring emerging technology and culture. He uses scanning, digital fabrication and computational approaches to making artefacts, both physical and digital, that often blur the distinction between the two.

The Venus of Google was ‘found’ via a Google reverse imagesearch of a photograph of a wooden box. The Google search returned visually similar results, one of these being an image of a woman modelling a body-wrap garment. A ‘hill-climbing’ algorithm then created a 3D figure by iteratively distorting and comparing the box to the found image of the woman, steering it towards a primitive 3D form driven entirely by algorithmic intelligence.

Presented at the AND Fair, the result can be considered an early artefact of bot-culture, an algorithmic artefact.