'Beautiful as the Chance Encounter of an Apple and a Banana on a Web Search Engine' is an interactive application that allows the user to play with physical queries. Inspired by the dadaist ready-made movement (Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table is the famous quote of the french writer Comte de Lautréamont used to describe the artistic movement), the project consists of a set of physical objects which can be placed in front of a webcam in order to navigate a web search engine (in this case flickr.com). The aim of the project is to find a new and playful way to browse internet content, pointing the attention of the user on the gesture of searching more than on the outcomes of the research.

A set of iconographic objects are each assigned a Reactivision marker. Every marker corresponds to a flickr tag. The user can choose one or more objects and put them on a plinth placed in front of a pc. He is invited to use a combination of objects in order to generate queries based on combination of words. As in a real flickr search session, the order of the objects from left to right affects the result of the research. The image displayed on the screen is searched live by Processing through the flickr API.