Google Doodle

A Google search for “Google facts” leads to features promising 15, 19, 26, 50 facts – prefaced by adjectives: surprising, crazy, amazing, interesting, fun, mind-blowing.

“Google’s worth” brings up this:

Larry Page’s Net Worth. Larry Page is, as of March 4, 2019, said to be worth approximately $52.4 billion, at least according to real-time information from Forbes. Per the most recent Forbes 400, Page ranked sixth among the richest people in the country. 4 Mar 2019¹

That’s a bit more than £43 million. Co-founder, with Serge Brin, of Google, Page is now CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Google is powerful. “The power Google has is extraordinary,” said someone whose business had been affected by a negative review.²

Like other megacorporations, Google wants to secure a good image. Transparency is important – or the glassy simulation of transparency, as in its HQ in California which features a public path running through it. Google has been a pioneer of employee perks and amenities which make news – free food, gyms, massage therapists, arcade games, decompression capsules. Work and play seem to blur, into labor-tainment.

Perhaps even more than other giant corporations (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix), Google’s preferred image is as a creative entity – funkily creative, for preference. Ironically you can read many academic papers about cultural capital on Google Scholar. Making work appear fun, of course, covers over the human cost of big business, though Google claims to attend to environmental impact: “We’re raising the bar in making smart use of Earth’s resources, expecting the highest ethical standards throughout our supply chain, and creating products with people and the planet in mind.”³

Google wants to look good.

There are several quizzes online which ask you to identify correctly the colors of each letter in the Google logo (for instance, https://www.buzzfeed.com/jenlewis/google-colors, which has the subheading “You’re not allowed to google it.”) Exact recognition of Google as a brand can be taken as an index of attention. Google is so everyday, so familiar, that the brand name is now a verb – from 1998, according to the Oxford English Dictionary – meaning “to look up information on the internet by using the Google search engine.”

There is as yet no entry (or none that I could find) for Google Doodle. In thinking about imaginative agency, I wondered about corporate forms. Plenty of big business want you to associate them with playfulness, play being a psychoanalytically charged way to catch customers. Sufficiently secure to play publicly with its logo, Google varies its home page between corporate logo – itself echoing child-friendly primary colors, alphabet books, cartoon eyes – and offerings from a genre of its own invention, the Google Doodle.

The Google Doodle seemed distinctly inventive and also possibly imaginative.

I investigated.

In this complicated landscape of fluidity, digital genres are unstable in unpredictable ways:

“Photo without captions is like book without a title” as one devotee of Instagram puts it.⁴ Narrativity teams up with iconicity in Google Doodles, alterations of the GOOGLE logo (often capitalized in the Doodles) to mark anniversaries or celebrate holidays, events, achievements, and people. The Google Doodle also alters relations between memorializing and mortality by conferring on its subjects terms like “145th birthday.” Initially images with hovertext, Google Doodles became animated and hyperlinked after 2010. More than 2,000 have been created to date (2019), contributing to the circulation of figures and discourses from around the world, and doing much to shape the fusion language of glocalization.⁵

The simple and often witty graphics of Google Doodles might be thought of as corporate imaginative agency: a creative form of idling, the doodle, is put at the service of a wide range of human achievements. The makers of Doodles are named, behind the scenes of a corporate banner in the form of the logo they adapt. Many of the Doodle subjects are transparently imaginative achievers such as writers and musicians; some of the anniversaries are creations of cultural memory (St. George’s Day, the Olympics). Imaginative agency may be doubly articulated: first, in the subject; second, in the graphics which bring the subjects and their achievements back to animated life. The complexities can be seen in the case of one to commemorate the dancer Martha Graham in 2011 on what would have been her 117th birthday.⁶ The Martha Graham Dance Company collaborated with Google on a sequence drawing on Graham’s signature solo from the 1930s Lamentations, in which she performed her new style of dance in a shrouded costume. In 2011 new cultural sensitivities meant controversy arose as to whether and how this robed figure might appear to incite women in conservative societies to cast off their veils. In Saudi Arabia, complainants asked Google to remove the images. Al-Watan Arabic daily reported that the complaints asked Google to remove the images “as a gesture of respect for Muslims’ feelings.”⁷

Controversy need not cancel agency –the designer whom Google commissioned to draw the Doodle said “that day my site crashed over and over again” – but it does show its effects at least as contested and its definition debatable.⁸ In relation to life writing, what Google defined as a challenge – How do you fit seven decades of American innovation into fifteen seconds? – configured Graham as a creative agent with reference to nationality rather than gender. Woodward’s demonstration of a life through lifetime achievement used a condensed, stylized life narrative so imaginatively miniaturized into signature moves that his work too was recognized as having imaginative agency. Whilst celebrating the Google Doodle as a form often inventive – and interesting – for life writing, it has a less than transparent politics, in that more American-themed doodles play to other parts of the world than vice versa. A Doodle for Nizar Qabbani, Syrian poet and activist, stays in the Middle East, as does one for Faten Hamama, a famous Egyptian actress. Mapping the mobility of Google Doodles would reveal cultural fences around imaginative agency.

The Doodles have an archive, which allows for comparisons. For instance, on June 4, 2019, I saw a Doodle celebrating fifty years of New York’s Pride March. Two testimonies from artists involved in making the Doodle link their personal history to graphic representation. Nathan Swineheart says

Working on this Doodle was a very personal project for me. As a member of the LBGTQ+ community, I am very familiar with the struggle of feeling included, accepted, and that I am a “part” of this world. Before I joined Google in 2014, I remember opening up the Google homepage to see a Doodle celebrating the Winter Olympics, depicting the colors of the Pride flag. I was completely blown away. Looking at the front page of Google, I was filled with hope and a feeling of belonging. That moment was a large part of why I wanted to become a Doodler. I recognized the opportunity we have to make a positive impact on the world, and to help make people feel seen, heard, and valued.⁹

Google Doodle Art Director Erich Nagler says:

When I was 18 years old, I went to college in New York City. Even as I was still finding my way out of the closet, I found myself on a walk through Greenwich Village, across Seventh Avenue where the street grid shifts and the streets get names instead of numbers. I passed Sheridan Square onto Christopher Street, the historic gay heart of the city. Here was the Stonewall Inn, the Lucille Loretta Theatre, the entrance to the PATH train, and the piers out into the Hudson River. Here was a neighborhood and a community where I could begin to love myself more and hate myself less, where I finally felt accepted, where I didn’t have to hide or pretend, where I could fully be me and find others like me. Over the past 50 years, that powerful spirit of pride has spread from Christopher Street to other streets and neighborhoods and communities, connecting people all around the world. That expanding spirit of love and acceptance is something we’ve hoped to capture in today’s Doodle.¹⁰

Colors infusing grey then come together to form the basis of the Doodle, with a street scene at first thinly populated, then gradually filled with a parade which gets busier and more exuberant across the five frames, each representing a decade. Taken together as life-writing miniatures, the two testimonials evoke different semiotics: the international heraldry of flags and the local iconicity of street names. Self-realization and belonging, one narrative about a digital locale, one about a pedestrian localization, march along to changes in pronouns, from I to we. The first account makes a Doodle itself a form of activism, able to signal celebration of identity; the second instances particular geographies as a paradigm of expanding a community, an expansion motivating the Doodle.

The map appended of the Doodle’s reach (arrived at by operating system, country, and history) shows it “reaching” North America, South America excluding Brazil, Iceland, Europe, South Africa, India, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. In some ways that’s a big reach, though not entirely without puzzles: São Paulo in Brazil hosts a Gay Pride parade with millions of attendees. The Guinness Book of Records thinks it the biggest such parade in the world; Grindr thinks it the best.¹¹

Google also appends a set of other Doodles for “this day.” What do they tell us? The first is the world’s first hot air balloon flight (hooray!) by the Montgolfiers. The reach of this Doodle covers all the world, minus a small list of countries (Iran, Yemen, Mauritania, Sudan, Guyana).

The same day, a Doodle marking Idul Fitri appeared, playing only in Indonesia and its associated territories. Eid, or the end of Ramadan, is important to Muslims worldwide; in the associated text (which appears only if you look for it, not with the Doodle) the Doodle is explained as Mudik, a going-home celebration particular to the Indonesian archipelago. Cultural practice subsumes religious practice?

Specific to India on June 4, 2017 was a Doodle depicting four expressions of an Indian film star, Nutan, famous for her ability to convey emotion without dialogue. The day would have been her eighty-first birthday – she died in 1991, aged fifty-four. Specific to Columbia was a Doodle in the style of artist Alejandro Obregon, known for his bold colors and abstraction. Born on June 4, 1920 (in Spain), he died in 1992.

Another Doodle for June 4 (involving a cactus) marked Father’s Day in Switzerland; weirdly it also reached Lithuania (and only Lithuania.) In 2014, a Doodle mimicking the typography of Solidarnosc marked “25 years of free elections in Poland.” On June 4, 2018, Canada and the US had a Doodle with an animation of Tom Longboat, a member of the Onondaga Nation and champion marathoner. An alternate version included in the behind the scenes stage shows a transition in his running sequence into military uniform: he had run across France during World War I as a despatch runner for the Canadian Army. There is no explanation as to why this was excised from the released version, nor why it reappears on the explanatory page. On June 4, 2013, only Ukraine was treated to a Doodle about an architect who was important in Kiev: Vladislav Gorodetsky if you want anglicized Russian spelling, Władysław Horodecki if you don’t.¹² One of his buildings in Kiev is an extraordinary house of chimaeras:

The Doodle was gestural, possibly because of competing national claims to the architect. Again. Google plays it safe?

The final offering for “This day in history” is a 2014 Doodle specific to Lithuania, showing a scene from a novel by writer Julija Beniuševičiūtė-Žymantienė, “best remembered for her stories about life among the peasantry.”

What can this group tell us about Doodles? A painter, an architect, a writer, an actor – all arts professions. An athlete, an exodus, a parade – all people in motion, in orderly if exuberant ways. Google likes round numbers, perhaps echoing its own circular digit-like name: birth anniversaries, death anniversaries; the Doodle also promotes odd numbers, subtending the otherwise odd invention of a posthumous birthday. A few Doodles are truly global; many are nation-specific or area-relevant. Controversy lurks – would Russians or Poles know that Horodecki/Gorodetsky was being seen in Ukraine, exclusively? – and controversy is also simply omitted: the Pride March Doodle makes no mention or visual reference to the way protest and parade linked arms and made a noise together. Subversive and contestatory aspects of what Doodles celebrate are bypassed.

The evolution of a particular Doodle is not usually shared, though guest artists’ sketches may be.¹³ One instance is the Doodle for Dame Cicely Saunders, shown on June 22, 2018.¹⁴

Saunders’s creation of the hospice movement in the UK, and her contribution to palliative care thinking and practice, was marked by positivity about the end of life. In the Doodle, the frame centers on windows (wide, lightly barred, not open) which have a sweeping view onto ripe fields of grain – a Shakespearian trope of ripeness is all, perhaps combined with Falstaff’s deathbed babbling of green fields, and a faint echo of the Biblical tenet of mortality, “All flesh is grass.” Google explains:

Today’s Doodle, created by London-based guest artist Briony May Smith, was inspired by Saunders’ favorite anthology, All in the End Is Harvest (1984) which states, “Love and life is an eternal thing, like the growth and reaping of the harvest.”¹⁵

Briony May Smith is an award-winning artist and illustrator who specializes in children’s books. Her earlier sketches, shown on the archive/about page, show two figures, one in a bed, one sitting supportively by the bedridden person, looking at a window against which flowers press; in the first of the pair, a warm yellow suffuses the room. Showing the sketches is a kind of movement in itself, and in the final version, the end-of-life woman is being pushed in a wheelchair in movement you infer (it’s not an animated movement.)

As infographic, the Doodle needs to tell us about Saunders – her medical authority is indicated by the nursing kit pinned on her coat; as infotainment, the Doodle needs to tell us pleasurably. A heartfelt eulogy by her brother follows the text description. Here I’d like to pick up Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti’s comment that “deliberate attention to ‘what happens as I perceive this’ marks autographical criticism.”¹⁶ They propose that critics who engage with what they call “the strange alchemy” of autographic word and image want readers to look for themselves too. Please do.

Without the least denigration of the immensely admirable Saunders, who reduced suffering, pioneered a culture of civilized dying, and who in 1967 founded St. Christopher’s Hospice in London, a place to which I have my own reasons to be very grateful, “what happens as I perceive this”? I felt a certain resistance to the rosy glow, noted the trees in the landscape seem to include cypress, an old emblem for death, and after some doubt, assumed the person pushing the woman seems to be Saunders. I also thought of a scene in the classic dystopian film Soylent Green (1973, set in New York in 2022, sic), when Sol, the character played by Edward G. Robinson, chooses his time and manner of death. He goes into a clinical room, lies down, presses buttons to choose music and film surround, and dies to the sound of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and alpine scenery. In case I misremembered this, I looked it up. Here is Roger Ebert’s description:

The most impressive scene is one of the last, when Robinson decides the time has come for him to die. He goes to “Home,” a gigantic euthanasia center, where he gets 20 minutes of his favorite color (orange) and wraparound movies of the way life used to be on Earth. His acting here is tremendously dignified, and all the more poignant when we realize this death scene was his last.¹⁷

Rewatching it, I see it isn’t Robinson who presses the buttons; there’s Tchaikovsky in the mix, and not exactly mountains – flowers, forests, ocean, and other locales of natural beauty. Slight fuzziness about detail in personal memory (not bad recall though for four decades) accompany slightly scrambled associations – Saunders’s dedication to the best way for someone to die, Robinson’s enactment of that in a dystopian context. The link may be climate crisis – Soylent Green was a prescient environmental parable about a world destroyed by pollution and overpopulation (it was loosely based on a 1966 science fiction novel, Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison). In this case “what happens as I perceive this” is picking up an instance of agency (imaginative agency, except that all imaginations appear to be catered for by the euthanasia center) which could be said to run alongside, if not quite parallel, with Saunders’s emphasis on more agency for the dying. The Doodle plays a distinct second place to the film, in part because the film's death sequence is so emotionally powerful – Robinson’s character Sol (an elderly academic – they have their uses) remembers the earth before it was despoiled and is a humanist hero. But the scene is also even more powerfully about visuality: seeing natural beauty again, Sol reacts with painful wonder, joy, astonishment. The graphically light style of a children’s illustrator versus the immersion of IMAX: Doodles can’t be philosophically weighty? And nor do they want to be: the draft sketches show Google letters as photo frames, with pleasantly scribbled portraits of presumably the dying woman’s family. Awkward questions about where might those people be and their conventionality – a graduation, weddings, and babies feature in the content – upset the tea and sympathy trope, represented by a fresh cup of tea between the letters. Nonetheless, the Doodle summons tact and charm to surmount the potential difficulty of the subject; shown only in the UK, its graphic style familiar to British readers from children’s book illustration, it presents soothing through style as well as subject. It makes light work of dying by representing it through lightness. Yet “what happens as I perceive this” is a degree of resistance, even discomfort, with that lightness too.

If one was looking for genealogies for the Google Doodle, there might be antecedents in some inventive 404 pages. This example¹⁸ shows tassels on a Mexican hat swinging sequentially – perhaps reminiscent of a popular executive desk toy, the Newton's cradle? Here¹⁹ movement creates playfulness, in a pattern which reassures by repetition. Simple movement in Doodles often appears in national day tributes, where flags ripple as if in a breeze.²⁰

More elaborate movement combines play with some wry distance between visual style and subject. A June 22, 2019 Doodle celebrating Teachers’ Day in El Salvador (and elsewhere in Central America) shows an underwater classroom, in which a red octopus performs teacherly tasks with its many arms, and a butterfly fish writes the answer to a sum on a blackboard using its beak. The surrealist leaning of this ensemble barely hides an adult view – teachers, like parents, are multitaskers. There are other movements – one group of fish swim by to hand in papers, another group appear to attend to an open book – making the Doodle quite hard to take in at one viewing.

Stylization and movement might also lead us to thinking about graphic narrative. Doodles have graphics and some narrative elements, if only the explicatory narrative of a caption to an image. Sidonie Smith’s analysis of graphic narrative begins

On any given day, graphic narration rides currents traversing the globe.…Such traffic along “the transnational circuitries of images and narratives” becomes a means through which new global identities are constituted, dispersed communities constellated, and transnational political alliances or identifications forged.

Yet alongside these global currents is a personal engagement with text. Smith continues:

The syncopation of personal storytelling across media (language and image) and space/time (boxes and gutters) in graphic narration activates, as Jared Gardner argues of comics generally, readerly co-interpretation: “All comics are necessarily collaborative texts between the imagination of the author/artist and the imagination of the reader who must complete the narrative.”²¹

Whilst the Google Doodle usually has one panel or frame (rather than the multiples in comics, with their boxes and gutters) it could be compared to the bigger spreads, or splash pages, whose function is more decorative and reflective. Or perhaps it is best seen as a hybrid: a splash panel? Some Doodles feature works by writers which put elements of their literary productions together in what might be readable as a biographical narrative; a long Doodle (3 min. 41 sec., March 2, 2019) celebrates the Czech composer Smetana through one of his symphonic works Vltava, about one of his homeland’s rivers.²²

The Doodle uses – recycles? – images from rather un-Czech sources, at least in one instance. The overview through clouds is adapted – with no credit – from Thomas Baldwin’s Airopaidia, a British aeronautical text published in 1785. In another Doodle, case, a literary work is the subject.

The Doodle was reported by newspapers in terms of a unique event, and an opportunity to “discover” a literary work still very well-known in Poland, but not hugely famous elsewhere.

This was Google’s explication, in full:

On this day in 1834, the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz published his masterpiece, Pan Tadeusz, often considered one of the last great epic poems in European literature. Written in Paris, the 12-part saga captures the spirit of Poland at a time when much of its territory was partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria.

Set during the years 1811 and 1812 in a Lithuanian village, the narrative focuses on a feud between two prominent families, complicated by the love between Tadeusz and a daughter of the rival family named Zosia. A revolt against the local Russian garrison brings the families together, inspired by a shared passion to restore Poland to its former glory: “When talk was to raise Poland again from this rubble.”

Required reading in Polish schools, Pan Tadeusz has been translated into many languages and adapted into TV and film versions, most recently in 1999 by Polish director Andrzej Wajda. Mickiewicz writes with great feeling, expressing his love and longing for all aspects of Polish life from the landscape (“These fields, painted with various grain, gilded with wheat, silvered with rye”), to the food (“mere words cannot tell of its wondrous taste, colour and marvellous smell”), to even the wildlife (“No frogs croak as divinely as Polish ones do”).²³

How does a reader co-interpret this? The ‘185th birthday’ of the poem might be rationale enough, with three cheers for literary exporting beyond borders. Or you might wonder about nationalism, resurgent in Poland under the presidency (2015–2020) of Andrzej Duda whose Law and Justice Party has done much to alarm liberals. Is a patriotic poem co-opted into contemporary nationalist fervor? Or does nationalism seem delusional if you think your country’s frogs croak better than anyone else’s? Are you invited to reflect on the spirit of Poland then, now, both, or neither?

Ideologically simpler co-creation appeared in a Doodle celebrating Johann Sebastian Bach, on March 21, 2019 (also Tunisia’s national day). Google explains it:

Today we celebrate world renowned German composer and musician Johann Sebastian Bach with our first ever AI-powered Doodle! Made in partnership with the Google Magenta and Google PAIR teams, the Doodle is an interactive experience encouraging players to compose a two measure melody of their choice. With the press of a button, the Doodle then uses machine learning to harmonize the custom melody into Bach’s signature music style (or a Bach 80’s rock style hybrid if you happen to find a very special easter egg in the Doodle...:)).²⁴

The graphic panel shows a wooden-head toy Bach playing a three-tier keyboard instrument, with the letters of Google, as if cut from wood, in motion around him.

Cogs turn, linking both the workings of eighteenth-century mechanisms and the automation process behind AI. You are invited to add notes to a stave which a machine learning program called Coconet then harmonizes and plays back to you. That certainly is co-creation, although in double form: you co-create with AI, and you co-operate with the concept of AI co-creating. The reach of this Doodle encompassed both Americas, Europe and Russia, North Africa, India, parts of South East Asia. It also reached YouTube, where on March 22, 2019 one co-creator posted his recreated co-creation. He explained “I made this by exporting 8 melody harmonisations (made from 3 different melodies) into MIDI files and changing them into pipe organs, plus arranging them in an interesting order.”

Google Doodles are inventive, and particularly imaginative in how the letters of Google metamorphose into new forms, seemingly endlessly. They could be read as manifestations of a corporation culture particularly evident among digital companies, where power is masked by apparent playfulness. It seems churlish to quarrel with the idea of harmless fun, unless you think it a symptom of the conversion of work to discourses and practices of play in which conditions of capital, labor, and other serious stuff are waved away. What has been called critical corporate studies is useful here.²⁵ One should also note that the defamiliarizing of Google’s component letters is a useful form of refreshing brand recognition, with attendant capital benefits. Some of that capital is cultural capital, but still capital. As the company itself puts it, “Google Doodles are temporary versions of the tech company’s logo, which periodically show up on its much-visited search page and honor holidays and historic occasions while bolstering the Google brand.”²⁶ Perhaps one can read Doodles as an imaginative genre, certainly with pleasures, in which agency is made humanist – the Doodles please people and represent people, even when the subject is other than a person. Latent politics of subjects are kept latent, or sanitized into forms acceptable to at least some parts of the globe, sometimes many. Much like global sport, which features regularly as a Doodle subject, apparent transnationality stands for good fellowship. Google also shows it attends to that audience by receiving suggestions for new Doodles from people who send them in. Since 2008 it has also run a competition for children in the United States who are invited to send in their own Doodles on a chosen theme – in 2019, “When I grow up I hope...” Prizes include a $30,000 college scholarship. “Figuring the human costs of big business,” as Bose and Lyon put it,²⁷ needs to take account of corporate self-interest in schemes to encourage client loyalty too.²⁸

Doodles were originally pictures or patterns drawn casually, though often intently, as an activity to alleviate boredom. With low aesthetic value – regularly synonymized with scribbles – they also had an association with defiance: you doodle instead of attending fully to something else. Metamorphosis into a Doodle carries over a tradition of escapism – you check out a Doodle as an activity that diverts from activating a purposeful Google search. As infotainment, Doodles piggyback on the creativity associated especially by doodlers themselves with freedom, since doodles as a genre have few conventions and fewer rules. A Wikihow explains, “As long as you relax and let your hand do the thinking, you’ll be on your way to having original, funny, or even gorgeous doodles.”²⁹ Ironically, doodles began as an out-of-office invented in 1998 by Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin who went off to the Burning Man festival: “They placed a stick figure drawing behind the 2nd ‘o’ in the word, Google, and the revised logo was intended as a comical message to Google users that the founders were ‘out of office.’”³⁰ An indication of not being at work has changed into a form of play compatible with work. The near-rhyme of Google and Doodle reinforces subliminally the brand’s claim to playfulness, in a powerful rhetoric boosted by the double o in each word which gives equivalence to the world’s largest internet company and being relaxed, original, and funny. If the doodle is a form of imaginative agency (turning boredom to creativity), Doodles co-opt agency to appropriate imagination as a corporate quality. That is, they’ve doodled for you; here’s the Doodle.

In a special issue of Biography on autographics, Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti note the proliferation of forms:

Critics of life narrative are now called upon to develop more advanced visual and cultural literacies to interpret the intersections of various modes and media and the complex embodiments of avatar, autobiographer, and reader/viewer gathered under the sign of autographics, and these demands can make us feel too hamstrung and half blind, working in a dim light…³¹

Similar challenges attend analysis of biographics, or biographical graphic narrative, with its equivalent complexities of biographical subject or occasion, the corporate team of Doodlers, and the reader/viewer.