Sam Bland has spent a lot of time with Google Goggles. He's learned how it sees the world and how it communicates – they play games together.

Goggles is the image search feature in the Google mobile app, and by layering the app's best attempts to match his photos, Bland has created an artistic view of the world as seen through Google's eyes.

His first experiment with it, for example, was a picture he took of a tennis racket. Google sent back a series of pictures that, while similar in tone and shape, had nothing to do with tennis. There was a polar bear, a nuclear missile launch and stock photo of a box of pills, among other things. Instead of being disappointed, Bland was fascinated. He liked that Google was confused.

"The way humans beings understand images is often through their content," says Bland, a photographer and videographer who lives in London. "We have an instant emotional or intellectual reaction, whereas Google couldn't see any of that."

That first experiment happened in 2012. Since then, Bland has been shooting and then building collages with the results (he now uses Google's web-based image search because it allows him to upload higher-res photos from his DSLR). Layering the photos makes cool art, but it also allows him to further investigate what the app is keying in on. Sometimes color is all it seems to chase; other times it gravitates to a random object in the corner of the frame.

Bland says he's come to appreciate Google's unpredictability.

"One of the things that got me was the extreme range and diversity of the images," he says. "It was putting these things together that might otherwise never go together."

As a photographer, Bland says he's also benefited from observing Google's selection process. It's helped him question his own human attachments to photos.

"I suppose watching how Google combines things has helped me see the world in a less conditioned way," he says.

Over time Bland has figured out what kind of images turn up the most visually interesting results for the collages, which are part of a series he calls Googlology. The original scene he photographs has to strike a balance. If the search image is too simple Google can nail it, making the collage boring. If the image is too complicated, the results are so varied they're almost impossible to combine in a meaningful way.

In an effort to create a consistent theme for the collages, Bland started taking photos at British museums. He likes combining an image made at a more traditional institution with photos gathered from Google, our modern information hub. Bland has also created guidelines for himself. He can change the size of the pictures and can tilt them in any direction but never cuts anything out and always uses all the images. Goggles used to give 12 suggested images (that feature was cut out in a recent update) so to stay consistent Bland says he only takes the top 12 from the internet search.

"Sometimes number 14 is the most beautiful image, but I gave myself a certain set of rules very early on and I stick to them," he says.