language-driven digital art

In this dazzling exploration of contemporary human feelings, digital whiz kids Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris use their computer programs to peer into the inner lives of millions, constructing a vast and deep portrait of our collective emotional landscape. Armed with custom software that scours the English-speaking world's new Internet blog posts every minute, hunting down the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling," the authors have collected over 12 million feelings since 2005, amassing an ever-growing database of human emotion that adds more than 10,000 new feelings a day. Drawing from this massive real-world stockpile of found sentiment, We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion presents the best of the best -- the euphoria, the despair, the passion, the dreams, and the desires that make us human. At turns touching and thought-provoking, humorous and heartbreaking, We Feel Fine combines the words and pictures of total strangers to explore every corner of the human experience. Packed with personal photos, scientific observations, statistical infographics, and countless candid vignettes from ordinary people, We Feel Fine is a visual, fiercely intelligent, endlessly engrossing crash course in the secrets of human emotion. Are men or women happier? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? Is beauty the bridge between happiness and negativity? How do our emotions change as we age? What causes depression? What's sexy? What's normal? What's human? We Feel Fine finally provides a way to answer these questions that is both quantitative and anecdotal, putting individual stories into a larger context and showing the stories behind the statistics -- or as the authors like to say, "bringing life to statistics and statistics to life." With lush, colorful spreads devoted to 50 feelings, 13 cities, 10 topics, 6 holidays,5 age groups, 4 weather conditions, and 2 genders, We Feel Fine explores our emotions from every angle, providing insights into and examples of each. Equal parts pop culture and psychology, computer science and conceptual art, sociology and storytelling, We Feel Fine is no ordinary book -- with thousands of authors from all over the world sharing their uncensored emotions, it is a radical experiment in mass authorship, merging the online and offline worlds to create an indispensable handbook for anyone interested in what it's like to be human.

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Missed Connections is a 2-Channel internet-aware software piece that continuously fetches the latest posts in the "missed connections" section of Craigslist.org. Each post is presented one at a time, and is filtered by looking for so-called stopwords. Computer Scientists define stopwords as those words that do not convey the meaning of a message. In essence, they are considered signal noise in the stream of potential information. Each post is presented simultaneously in two ways: one just with stopwords, the other with non-stopwords, and in both cases the filtered words are displayed as dashed lines, akin to the way words are presented in the game Hangman. Thus, both posts present the same "graphical" structure, but have the potential for very different readings. Source: work description at author's website

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

Source: mission statement by the authors (wefeelfine.org)

Programmatic or computational art is often, although not necessarily, related to art in other media: visual, performative, conceptual, and so on. The art systems of The Readers Project relate to writing and to reading, to our encounters with literary language. This project is an essay in language-driven digital art, in writing digital media. The Readers Project visualizes reading, although it does not do this in the sense of miming conventional human reading. Rather, the project explores and visualizes existing and alternative vectors of reading, vectors that are motivated by the properties and methods of language and language art.

Visualization, especially as a function of computation, is now quite commonplace in artistic practice, but it has little culture moment unless it provides critique, and it is not art unless it conveys an aesthetic. The Readers Project is a visualization of reading but it is implicitly critical of conventional reading habits. Further, because the project’s readers move within and are thus composed by the words within which they move, they also, effectively, write. They generate texts and the traces of their writings are offered to the project’s human readers as such, as writing, as literary art; published as real-time streams of live-writing, available to anyone with internet access.

Computationally-engaged text generation has a significant, if marginal, history in literary art practice. The Readers Project is innovative, however, in having found a number of ways to display the primary source of a text generator’s inputs within this source’s typographically structured literary environment. A less obvious but equally important aspect of the project is its use of current natural language information—especially concerning the relative frequencies of words and phrases considered by the readers—culled from the largest corpus of human language that has ever existed, a universe of language no longer deep within or distant from us, but now made visible to all by the free demons of web indexing and, more recently, by active cells of the Natural Language Liberation Front (http://nllf.net/).

(Source: Artists' Statement from the project site)