Art of Tags
Art of Tags
An interactive generative art piece exploring how tags shape the way we find and understand images.
Art of Tags examines the qualitative aspects of folksonomies. It uses del.icio.us and Flickr to explore how people create, use and distribute tags, then turns the resulting data into an interactive generative art piece.
Del.icio.us generates a pool of tags for a search term, ordered by frequency and relevance. Those tags are then used to find related Flickr images. Because tags are arbitrary and personal, the returned images are often apparently unrelated to the original search.
The generative art mixer lets users play with these results and visualise the relationships. The aim is not to reproduce the source information accurately, but to abstract it into a more expressive visual form. The user has some control over the result, while the data and the computer determine where the journey goes.
