Purplish and Cruel is the first of a series of semiotic exercises intended to explore abstracted relationships between language and images. In this case, a passage from Don DeLillo’s White Noise is used to search for web-images with similar descriptions, thus translating his linguistic tropes through the mediating agency of the Internet. As these images are collected and arrayed on screen, they are further removed from their original sources and embedded in a visual language composed of color, motion, and form.