Speaking of compiling list...

On a vaguely relateable subject to Nathan's post below, Taryn Simon has been collaborating with 'technologist' Aron Swartz to create the Image Atlas. It is an interactive online work which investigates cultural differences and similarities by indexing top image results for given search terms across local engines throughout the world. Visitors can refine or expand their comparisons from the 57 countries currently available, and sort by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or alphabetical order. This work was created during Rhizome's Seven on Seven Conference at the New Museum in New York. *

You can view the Image Atlas here

Website with contemporary art typed into the search engine


The New Yorker, Culture Desk, " Taryn Simon's Visual Babel"

"Image Atlas highlights cultural differences and similarities, and questions the possibility of a universal visual language. In some searches it presents a flattening and in others it highlights the inevitability of contrast. And then there are the scrambled moments-like, I typed in the word "jew." The results yielded a crude caricature that seems to have circulated in many countries. In Syria, it presented Obama in a yarmulke, and then in Germany it was all photos of Jude Law, because Jew in translation is "jude," and clearly "jude law" is getting more hits than "jew" within those borders right now. As people move farther away from verbal communication (Instagram, etc.), it's worth questioning if visual communication is subject to the same issues of translation and misinterpretation found in verbal communication."



You can read the rest of that article here

*http://www.gagosian.com/news/2012/08/03/479

Kit