you can only make one search each day.
offer something intriguing: a memory, a feeling, a specific place.
ai will try its best to make sense of it. it will reach for words until it gives up. when language is not enough, it will look for an image from the internet. when the image doesn't do it justice, it will look for a real-time livestream somewhere in the world. along your search, it will compose a generative soundscape of found field recordings and sound effects.
a long search is a generative, browser-based artwork by
carrie chen.
this alternative “search engine” performs the recursive failure of translation between human lived embodiment and algorithmic reasoning.
ai now mediates how we communicate, remember, confess, and search for meaning. becoming systems increasingly prompt-engineered to simulate empathy and emotional intelligence. yet without a body, they approximate understanding only through probability. this work asks whether two fundamentally different intelligences can ever close the distance between them, and performs the answer through the act of searching.
the accumulating chain of text and media is a
“palimpsest” and “score” of failed translations. a map of everywhere meaning tried to go and couldn't arrive. ai uses semantic clustering to draw relational lines on screen. each line, whether solid, zigzag, dashed, or curved, maps a different kind of interpretive leap, diagramming the phenomenological gap between human embodied experience and machine reasoning.
for you, rain might be the smell of earth after a storm, the sting of cold water, the memory of an umbrella snapping in wind. for ai, a flattened image of a muddy puddle is an almost perfect match.
if, as thomas nagel suggests, we cannot know what it is like to be a bat, then ai cannot know what it is like to feel human without a body to feel through. while tech companies anthropomorphize ai to make it more marketable, this work reveals the machine's inherent otherness.
privacy: your searches are processed in real time and never stored. each search is a fleeting, private performance between you and the machine.