An art installation was on display in the Centre Pompidou National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, where visitors could contribute
with their own personal objects, adding keyword descriptions and quantified semantic features such as age or hardness. The data was projected in real-time onto a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) which was shown in the gallery. In this paper we analyze
the same data by extracting visual features from the images and organize the image collection with multiple SOMs. We show
how this mapping facilitates the emergence of semantic associations between visual, textual and metadata modalities by studying
the distributions of the different feature vectors on the SOMs.
This work was supported by the Academy of Finland in the projects Neural methods in information retrieval based on automatic content analysis and relevance feedback and Finnish Centre of Excellence in Adaptive Informatics Research.