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Entertainment

The Supercut Machine: A Search Engine For Movie Scenes

The installation Algorithmic Search For Love is a dream come true in the search engine universe.

Who doesn’t love a good supercut? And no, we’re not referring to the budget hair salon, but rather to the obsessive fan-created video montages that string together isolated scenes from movies, TV shows and other video content to create an all-encompassing sequence of usually hilarious proportions. The genre has given birth to such instant classics as “Every Single Dude,” a supercut of scenes from The Big Lebowski and this gem of “Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit.”

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Supercuts are fun to watch, but incredibly tedious to create. You’ve got to slog through all that footage and painstakingly mark and grab every scene. But that’s all about to change thanks to Austrian new media artist Julian Palacz, whose graduation project Algorithmic Search For Love indexes all the captioned videos of his personal film collection and algorithmically searches the text search engine to automatically locate scenes associated with a specific keyword or phrase.

"By submitting a line like “I love her,” all the video clips with this sentence will be displayed in a sequence. The selection of keywords, therefore, determines the image and sound sequencing process in the film.Algorithmic Search For Love creates an algorithm for the user that opens new possibilities for audiovisual narratives."

The Algorithmic Search For Love is currently part of FILE (Electronic Language International Festival) in São Paulo and will be on display until August 21.