The Return Trip is Never the Same is an art project that explores both insect behavior and how technology affects human language.

While at Google’s Cultural Institute in Paris, for their artist residency, Adriana Ramić began meeting with etymology enthusiasts at the local Museum of Natural History.

There she met a scientist, who gave her a copy of a book with no text, just pages of drawings of ant movement patterns by Victor Cornetz, a French topographer and a naturalist.

Ramić traced those ant patterns onto an Android Swype keyboard.

Because Swype uses algorithms and a language model to interpret fingertip swipes into text, this generated blocks of nonsensical sentences.

Sample text is seen here: "sadness golf dry please drafting."

Ramic re-interpreted the ant pathways into textured strokes that look like finger paints.

She repeated this technique with 190 of Cornetz’s drawings, in all 71 languages supported by Swype, and wound up with 82 pages in her art e-book.

“It’s about tracking how aunts move, and how Swype is tracking me," Ramić says.