Vimeo user kingcosmonaut3000 has created a video which plays a succession of the images returned by Google Image Search when it’s fed its own results. It flicks through 2951 images displayed at 12 frames a second.

Starmaps become dark photos of men at conferences become an LA Noire interrogation scene becomes a shot from Pirates of the Caribbean. They cycle through similar subjects, then matching colours, then shapes.

What’s amazing are the spurts of innovation after periods where the image stays fairly constant – they’re sort of like flowerings of culture after long periods in which everything has stayed uniform. Like the Renaissance, or LOLcats and Y U NO Guy.

Sometimes, like at 1:54, a pattern’s completely disrupted by an apparently dissimilar one – a bug? Or is Google seeing something we’re not? And that bit where it gets stuck on the Google homepage – evidence of a self-regarding machine?