Jim Andrews
Since the beginning
Works in Victoria Canada

ARTBASE (2)
BIO
Jim Andrews does http://vispo.com . He is a poet-programmer and audio guy. His work explores the new media possibilities of poetry, and seeks to synthesize the poetical with other arts and media.
Discussions (847) Opportunities (2) Events (14) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: google api for image search?


> I have been wanting to try the yahoo image search api. Anybody
> out there use it?

Yes, I am using the yahoo image search api (docs at http://developer.yahoo.com/search/image/V1/imageSearch.html ) now at http://vispo.com/dbcinema (as well as google). The things i don't like about it are the api does not let you specify image size, and you get only about 5000 queries per day per IP (though that should usually suffice because each query can return up to 50 images (i'm using 16 per query)). the things i like about it are it *is an api*; and it maxes out at 1500 images per query (rather than 1000 with google); and the parsing is very quick and simple because the results can be received in xml format.

currently, by default, when you do a dbcinema search, it first gets google results and then, after those have been displayed, displays yahoo results. though you can change that by changing the "Search Range" box accessible from the dbcinema toolbar.

common concepts return about 2500 images (google + yahoo).

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

July on -empyre-


July 2006 on -empyre- soft-skinned space: "Bare Life"

http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Please join guests Jordan Crandall (US), Tina Gonsalves (AU), GH
Hovagimyan (US), Conor McGarrigle (IR), Susana Mendes Silva (PT), and
Michele White (US) as we address
a question posed by the upcoming Documenta 12:

What is bare life?

This question is one of three leitmotifs being talked about, and
written about all over the world during 2006, in collaboration with
the Documenta Magazine Project ( http://www.documenta12.de/english/
leitmotifs.html ) -empyre- is honored to be invited into the
conversation, as an Australian based new media publication and
international collaborative list, founded by Melinda Rackham in
2002. In March 2006, we spent a lively multilingual month on 'Is
Modernity our Antiquity" -- and the archives for this discussion are
online now at https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-March/

The Documenta Magazine project editors describe it this way......

"What is bare life?

" This second question underscores the sheer vulnerability and
complete exposure of being. Bare life deals with that part of our
existence from which no measure of security will ever protect us. But
as in sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with
infinite pleasure. There is an apocalyptic and obviously political
dimension to bare life (brought out by torture and the concentration
camp). There is, however, also a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension
to it

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: google api for image search?


i have pretty much fixed the problem i was having; http://vispo.com/dbcinema is working again.

the problem was caused by google having changed the format of their html image search results. the old format still obtains if the request is not from inside a browser--as is the case with server-side processing and in, say, authoring or projector mode in director. but if the google query comes from a browser, the html image search results now are quite different than what they have been the last couple of years.

since, as you point out, there is no official google api for image search, part of what that means is that programs that use google image search are hacks, if part of the definition of 'hack' is code that gets a program to do something it was never intended to do. hacks are interesting precisely because they do the unexpected, but since they are not supported, they sometimes have a short life.

Patrick Tresset pointed out that Yahoo actually has provided an image search API: http://developer.yahoo.com/search/image/V1/imageSearch.html . In other words they support the notion of programmers using Yahoo image search. And with that support comes, presumably, a longer life for programs that use this published API.

I have fixed the dbcinema/google problem by re-writing the routine that parses the google image search html results, but i realize it's just a matter of time before i have to do that again. so i am going to use the yahoo api, make that the primary search apparatus of dbcinema, and use google as a secondary search engine; if google isn't working in dbcinema, dbcinema will still get images from yahoo.

i imagine that in the future, net art will routinely use many web services that have published api's and supply all sorts of services including text, image, sound, and video search, dictionaries, thesaurii, stock info, but also things like, oh, you send the service a sentence and the service sends back the sentence parsed into the parts of speech or sends back the sentence parsed semantically, in some sense--services that will allow us use AI in interesting ways. there is of course some of this going on now, as we see in the alice bot api. in general, there will be all sorts of (queriable) web service api's available that turn the idea of net art into something whereby we really do see interesting use of the global info databases toward an art of larger and other mind.

ja
http://vispo.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-list@rhizome.org [mailto:owner-list@rhizome.org]On Behalf Of
> Steve OR Steven Read
> Sent: June 29, 2006 12:08 PM
> To: list@rhizome.org
> Subject: RHIZOME_RAW: Re: Re: google api for image search?
>
>
> The google search api doesn't include image search functionality,
> only web search. However, one can parse the google web search
> results for image tags. I use PHP with PEAR:SOAP package to do
> it, and its very fast. I have some html parsing code (in php)
> which does this. I would happy to share some of this code with others.
>
> An example of this is here at my new site:
> http://www.stevenread.signoi.com/photonoise
>
> This site is still in dev/test, but the photo noise app and its
> code has been running strong every day for nearly 2 years (at
> stevenread.com)
>
> I would be interested in hearing other ways that people have used
> the google apis for image capture???
>
> -Steve
>
> Barry Hoggard wrote:
>
> > On Jun 27, 2006, at 7:42 AM, Jim Andrews wrote:
> >
> > > a question for the programmer-artists, if i may.
> > >
> > > has anyone used the google api's to retrieve images from image
> > search?
> > >
> > > ja
> > > http://vispo.com
> >
> >
> > What language do you want to use? If it's in Perl, I would use this:
> >
> > http://search.cpan.org/~grousse/WWW-Google-Images-0.6.2/
> >
> > I'm sure there are modules for Java, PHP, etc. too.

DISCUSSION

google api for image search?


a question for the programmer-artists, if i may.

has anyone used the google api's to retrieve images from image search?

ja
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

Links to interactive audio on the Web--the Web page


I've put together a page featuring all the links I've saved concerning works
of interactive audio for the Web. The URL is http://vispo.com/misc/ia.htm

Please drop me a line and let me know of other works of interactive audio
for the Web not on this page.

I wrote an article in 2003 about the subject at
http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?articleE but several of the
main links aren't working anymore, so I thought I'd create and update a
links page.

ja
http://vispo.com