These digital images are made from the most searched topics of 2020

Vida Gergely’s series Clouds: Global 2020 is made using photos and GIFs from the most searched topics of 2020 according to Google Trends — such as “coronavirus”, “[US] election results”, and “Zoom”. The Hungarian photographer and programmer — who describes his project as “photography without a camera”, or “a digital camera obscura” — built each of these 10 artworks by extracting the source code from between 600 and 1200 popular images.

He then used Python and a simple bash script to create the final images. For some images, Gergely experimented with multiple variations of the script, since sometimes “they didn’t work” or generated black and white results.

His favourite visual was generated from GIFs: “if [a file] has many frames, the GIFs generate a very remarkable form”, he told The Calvert Journal. “Since one GIF is made out of 10, 50, 200 frames, or more, if you stack them together, they will draw a light rectangle, adding this stronger shape [than single, disparate images], or an extra lightness to the final result.”