searching by drawing
exploring drawing programs
Drawing abstractly in paint programs is a sort of like playing with fractal software. You manipulate a set of parameters, and in the process, travel through a kind of virtual space.  

After some time goes by, you either wind up lost, or find yourself in a location that feels special. In the latter case, you might want to preserve your findings, so that the special location may be visited later.

Revisiting the location, however, by-passes the time spent exploring, and instead teleports you to the destination instantaneously, i.e. re-opening a saved bitmap image.

This might be desired for someone else visiting the location for the first time. A lack of context or understanding as to how you arrived at the special location creates a sense of wonder.

A trade off is that the missing context--the exploratory period--might contain moments as interesting (if not more interesting) than the special location discovered during the exploration.

reverse image search
When google introduced its version of content-based image retrieval many years ago, I tried using it on my own abstract drawings to see what sort of visually similar content turned up.  

There were several 'okay' results, but a few results in particular that were so remarkably similar to my image query that I became immediately obsessed with the concept of reverse image searching--specifically trying to find what all that is out there, online, that looks similar to what I made, or wanted to make.

combining the two together
The following series of images are moments saved periodically during sessions of aimless wandering in photoshop.

After a few snapshots have been taken, a reverse image search is performed on each snapshot, and whatever ends up looking/feeling/seeming like the original image is saved and paired next to it.

np
no
nn
nm
nl
nk
nj
ni
nh
ng
nf
ne
nd
nc
nb


last updated september 5, 2019
home