The Mimeticon is a search engine which allows you to search for images by visual similarity instead of using text. It uses keywords but requires the user to select a specific alphabet which it interprets as a search image.

Although the internet has far more images than text, we still cannot really search for them on their own terms, having to rely instead on conventional text based search engines like Google. Mimeticon is an art project that uses a fundamentally different engine that takes a 'key image' and searches for visually similar images.

The Mimeticon is a Baroque search engine that uses pictorial alphabets from history. Mimeticon still uses keywords but requires the user to select a specific alphabet before searching. It then takes the word in this alphabet and interprets it as an image or 'word picture' used to search for similar pictures.

Searching by visual appearance is known as Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) and is still an emerging technology. Mimeticon shows how the possibilities of CBIR are part of the Baroque tradition of language and image conjoined as written text. Their ornamental alphabets recall the figurative origins of the Latin alphabet back to Egyptian hieroglyphics. Although CBIR will soon allow true visual instead of textual searching, Mimeticon uses the history of the alphabet to remove the barriers between the two.