Collective Unconscious

Beat Brogle and Philppe Zimmermans's One Word Movie is an online platform which organizes, based on user-supplied terms, the flood of images on the internet into an animated film. A word turns into images, images turn into a movie. This project plays with the tension between online and cinematic approaches to images. What images are associated with what words? One Word Movie reveals a glimpse into the collective psychology of online cultures by showing patterns of word image associations, as created by millions of people around the world.

Using a specially programmed search engine, users can call up images from the Internet which match their search term. The project's search engine is built on top of the most popular image search facilities available on the Internet (e.g. Google). Supplied with a search term, the engine produces first a «hit list». This list can be several thousand images long, depending on the term. The images on this «hit list» provide the «raw material» for the movie . Following the ranking on the «hit list», the images are animated into a film in real-time, following a fixed and predetermined score, which consists of a series of interwoven loops. Each film has an individual trailer, displaying the search term as the title and each film lasts until the «raw material» is used up.