Si hoy escribo cómo me siento pasaré a ser una de esos circulitos que hay en la imagen de arriba gracias a Jonathan Harris

¿alguna vez has pensado cómo expresar lo que ocurre en el mundo

más allá de las gráficas con x y z?

El análisis de la información que circula por la red en forma de gráficas o aplicaciones interactivas produce resultados de una estética muy sugerente e intuitiva. Los ceros y los unos, así como las letras y los números ya no los vemos gracias a la estética de la información

Pero ¿qué ocurre si lo que decides representar tiene que ver con lo que la gente siente, a quien quieren, cuales son las imagenes de su vida, qué buscan, etc?

Jonathan Harris también se hizo algunas de estas preguntas y ha generado experimentos antropológicos en forma de webs que van más allá de lo puramente visual.

Las hay que analizan lo que la gente siente a través de lo que escribe en sus blogs:

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Otras analizan las relaciones personales, quien somos y a quien queremos a través de las webs de citas:

http://iwantyoutowantme.org/

Las hay que tomando como base las imágenes y palabras que son noticia y genera una cuadrícula 10x10 como un registro diario de nuestro tiempo.

http://www.tenbyten.org/index.html

Si quieres ver todo lo que ha creado este personaje aquí tienes su web

[merece la pena investigar un poco, aquí no cabe todo lo que se le ha ocurrido]

http://number27.org/

Y aquí un vídeo explicando algunos de estos proyectos y su charla sobre las historias secretas de la red.

Estas son las imágenes que resumen el mundo un año antes de que escribiera esta entrada

]]> http://flashartist.wordpress.com/?p=213 Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:35:45 +0000 flashartist http://flashartist.sv.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/tenbytenorg/ A fascinating Flash Site ,

10x10 create a snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, course of days, months, and years, 10x10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.

Flashartist .org shot this video of 10x10 author Jonathan Harris talking about this unique project at FlashOntheBeach 2008.

Rok akademicki zapowiada się ciężko, zwłaszcza, że trzeba pomyśleć o magisterce. Wybór promotorów nie nastawia pozytywnie, nie wiem czy przejdzie moja chęć stworzenia jakiegoś projektu. Czegoś takiego fajnego jak na przykład Universe Jonathana Harrisa (polecam też jego projekt We Feel Fine, oraz prezentację na TED). Nie chcę ślęczeć nad pisaniem nudnych rzeczy, strona po stronie zastanawiając się dlaczego ja i po co to komu. Zobaczymy, jak na to moje chcecie zareaguje promotorka.

Wczoraj przetrwałam szkolenie (nie, że coś z nim było nie w porządku, zwykłe zmęczenie jechaniem do Krakowa od 3 w nocy w niezbyt sprzyjających warunkach) na temat dostępu do informacji publicznej. Bardzo ładnie prowadzone przez członków Pozarządowego Centrum Dostępu do Informacji Publicznej. Sporo się dowiedziałam, ciekawe ile z tego zapomnę w najbliższym czasie ;d

Coś jeszcze chyba miałam pisać, ale wyleciało mi z dziurawej głowy. Trudno, i tak pewnie nie było to nic zbyt porywającego.

Y es que tiendas de kebabs no tendrán tan extendidas por alli como aquí, pero Starbucks...

Hablando de ellos, encontré el otro día una imagen de Jonathan Harris, en el que aparece reflejada la creación de su producto, totalmente goblalizado, mostrando el lugar de origen de las diferentes partes.

Hasta 19 paises de los 5 continentes toman parte.

Y es que están muy currados los dibujos, con tanta explicación y kaos aparente. Echadle un ojo a su galeria

Vía Microsiervos

The Whale Hunt, created by multimedia artist Jonathan Harris, depicts his trip from Brooklyn, New York, to Barrow Alaska, to photograph an Inupiat Bowhead whale hunt. Images taken every five minutes for nine days are displayed online in multiple visual and functional modes that push the boundaries of digital interface design, programming, and image-based narrative practice. While this site was not produced by the Inupiat community that is the subject of the project, Harris’ subjective, reflexive, interactive, and flexible design of the viewing and storytelling experience aptly reveals the multi-faceted conditions of his experience as the producer of the representations and his interaction with the community as he was allowed to participate in the hunt and distribution of food.

I find his stories and experiences compelling, and gives me insight on the ability of ideas to evolve. From small, infintessimal, and perhaps random and chaotic fragments, they can amalgamate and evolve into larger fragments, until the idea takes on a life of its own.

Jonathan shows us how thoughts, images, and narratives amalgamate into a fuller story about ourselves. The ideological institutions we take for granted nowadays, from science, religion, health, politics--all began as a spark, an idea--that all began to take a life of their own, and consequently influence further ideas and stories.

Thanks to Jonathan for showing us the power of fragments.

In going through some old blogs I was amazed that I somehow forgot to share this video. It is a video speech of Jonathan Harris. Jonathan writes interesting programs that search the Internet for glimpses of the human condition.

It is a bit long (about 19 min.) but I found it very interesting and worth sharing. I also added his websites below but I highly recommend you watch the video in its entirety before visiting the sites. 

Jonathan's Sites...

The Universe

We Feel Fine

Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, Jonathan Harris designs systems to explore and explain the human world.

This is amazing. I love this idea of listening to other's stories, even if it's just a small bit. Thinking of all the small stories in the world that easily disappear makes me sad.

When I saw that road worker holding 9 balloons, it surprised me, especially when I saw his hands.

I love it.

Meeup also has a neat video on their home page that shows how Meetup helps individuals find others to meet with.] Meetup has also expanded in new directions, providing resources for Meetup organizers to help them to recruit others, run good meetings, etc.

In addition, Meetup is trying to mimic some of the resources of pre-Meetup groups, to federate with each other, form alliances, etc. Say that the chihuahua group in Denver and the poodle group in Denver (and other Denver dog Meetups) want to collaborate to fight a new proposed leash law in Denver, Meetup Alliance helps them do this. MeetupAlliance, in any interesting approach, actually lets groups ally with each other, not limited to Meetup groups: one can include Google groups or Yahoo groups, Facebook Causes, or MySpace groups. One can see a dynamic list of the largest alliances to-date (at this point Ron Paul, and an alliance of women-helping-women groups).

In the same way as Craigslist has caused newspapers to hemorrage cash (as they used to get a lot of money from want ads that are now often listed instead wtih Craigslist at free or reduced rates), one wonders whether Meetup might be the nail in the coffin of bricks-and-mortar chapter organizations.

Voluntary associations used to do several things:

1) provide options for individuals to meet regularly about their shared interest

2) have political clout through numbers

3) select officers/leaders through their members

4) meet annually or quarterly at conferences to learn about what was happening in a field, form social capital, etc.

5) provide educational activities: books, pamphlets, courses, etc. that are offered to members to further their knowledge about the topic of the voluntary association (be it nursing, or home-schooling, or ...).

Meetup used to just do #1 (arranging meetings). Now they do #2 (enable political clout through affiliation). #3 seems somewhat of a no-brainer (it would be easy to have electronic votes of members and position statements). #4 might be a challenge, although presumably there may be good event-planners and coordinators that would collaborate with Meetup to offer #4. I'm less clear about whether #5 is easy to contract out, but with a more transparent platform that shows how many members there are in each alliance or group, it may be easier for freelance writers to market their books or materials to Meetup groups that share an interest in what they are writing about.

Meetup writes in their FAQs for MeetupAlliance: "Can existing Chapter-based organizations use MAP [Meetup Alliance Platform]? Absolutely! MAP removes many of the headaches of running an organization with chapters. To learn more e-mail us."

But the key question will be what the value proposition: how much bang do members get for the buck? Members of Meetup chapter organizations presumably will pay a lot less in dues than the old bricks-and-mortar chapter organizations?.The real question is the quality of the meetings, the social entrepreneurship and political clout that these groups can have, the quality of their social capital and what they continue to learn through educational activities."

Of course, there are always countless claims of how technology is going to do away with the old. Remember the "paperless office" we were going to work in? So I certainly wouldn't count chapter-based organizations out -- there are probably more people meeting in Texas in a given month through bricks-and-mortar voluntary organizations than worldwide with Meetup in a month. But if Meetup is really smart about figuring out how to teach others to run efficient meetings, how to aggregate political clout on-line, how to run organizations well, how to outsource efficient annual meetings, there could be something transformative going on here. I know Scott Heiferman (Meetup.com) founder aspires to this. What's important about Scott is that he is wise enough to realize that there are lots of things that people cannot do on-line that require face-to-face contact which is why Meetup was all built around regular F2F meetings (Meetups).

One final note: while Meetup seems way ahead of the curve in thinking about how on-line groups might start to replace bricks-and-mortar voluntary associations or chapter groups, the "finding your tribe" space has become more crowded recently along with sites that enable one-time get-togethers. Facebook's causes enables people to form looser tribes and use this to spur philanthropy; and Facebook has launched its own events services to enable simple confabs (and has the advantage that users already have some of their friends listed on the site). MyPunchBowl (like evite) enables people to plan simple events and invite others on-line but seems less focused around regular meetings. Yelp (primarily focused on user ratings of restaurants, services, things to see in a city, etc.) now also features a service "Invite Friends" that enables users to plan events. Meetup obviously has a huge head start on these other groups but it will be interesting to see whether they are as smart about trying to offer a deep civic alternative (as the bricks-and-mortar chapter-based voluntary associations do).

I was recently at a conference and heard about Jonathan Harris.  The Polaroid Project seems to be his most recent work.  It was created in two hours in a live art event with cut up Polaroids.  I like many things about this work, not the least of which is the fact that it was an event, co-created, interactive.  Three photographers were given polaroid cameras, an audience of 300 people dressed as grandmothers, a bag of tools to cut up the polaroids and two hours to put it all back together in what ultimately looks like a polaroid.

BLue to red, male to female, hacked up yet put back together somehow - seems fitting.  I think it's great!

Jonathan Harris collects stories. Stories that run across all media, and only non-fiction stories. Objects are an integral part of the story collection. It's a fascinating process, check it out.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_harris_collects_stories.html

Jonathan Harris on TED

Also to access the site he mentions called "We feel fine", go here

We Feel Fine.org are a collection of feelings are captured via meta tags from blogs, such as livejournal or wordpress. This tags are written by people around the globe and captured via this program.

Love-Lines is a project which explores the humans desire. Using the same technique of wefeelfine.org, this app captures love or hate tags and lines from bloggers from around the world and also captures pictures of loves around the world everyday.

Check out the links!

created by: Lafeya Agwosi, Aimi Awang, Jihge Baek, Sally Barrett-Spring, Sarah Cupitt, Alice Dupre, Jonathan Harris, Blair Mowatt - winners of Germ 07

inspired by: Big Art Mob

Artist and computer scientist Jonathan Harris makes online art that captures the world's expression – and gives us a glimpse of the soul of the internet. His projects are both intensely personal (the "We Feel Fine" project, which scans the world's blogs to collect snapshots of the writers' feelings) and entirely global ("Universe," which turns current events into constellations of words). But their effect is the same – to show off a world that resonates with shared emotions, concerns, problems, triumphs, and troubles.

And when people get lost, they will simply return to their human nature. They will look out for the oldest, wisest, or craziest people out there. I don’t think the world needs more information. We don’t need any more or better content aggregation, search algorithms or noise filters. We need more inspiration. We need storytellers (and that will be the topic of another post).

I figured it would be good to spent another post on this topic and introduce you to a few storytellers I deeply admire. These are people that aren't looking at their rating on any blogging leaderboard. They don't publish for the sake of it. They don't bring you the breaking news everyone else already does. They are, in my opinion, people that like to take the time to tell us a story. Something that is nearly always fascinating to read, and often leaves the reader with more questions than answers. They make you think, and that is the sole purpose of their act.

Jonathan Harris

If you are a regular reader of this weblog, then you already know that I am a big fan of Jonathan Harris. He is one of the best storytellers I know. You can find most of his work right here. One of the projects he did that really amazed me is called Universe.

Jonathan writes:

Each night, the great stories of ancient Greek mythology are played out in the sky — Perseus rescues Andromeda from the sea monster; Orion faces the roaring bull; Zeus battles Cronos for control of Mount Olympus. Most of us know the sky holds these great myths, immortalized as constellations. Slightly less well known are the newer constellations, largely added in the 18th and 19th centuries. These more modern constellations reflect a different sort of mythology — a commemoration of art and science, expressed through star groups representing technical inventions like the microscope, the triangle, the compass, the level, and the easel.

As humans, we have a long history of projecting our great stories into the night sky. This leads us to wonder: if we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict? These questions form the inspiration for Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations.

....

Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone's path through Universe is different, just as everyone's path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife.

Universe is a concept in which Jonathan brings back our fascination of content exploration. In the earliest times humans would look at the sky and explore the universe. With universe he has created a concept and interface that allows us to explore the world once again. Instead of sitting back and getting stuff aggregated to your screen or profile, Universe demands you to explore, to discover, to be fascinated. Each trip is different.

There is a whole lot more to discover on his site. I love his work on human emotions (check out "We feel fine"). I have seen him present his work once and ever since I have been following him. For all you Twitter fans out there. Jonathan inspired a Twitter tool that is way cooler and more fascinating than any of the tools I'm aware of. check out twistori to find out what Twitter users are experiencing right now!

Rolf Skyberg

Anyone that has the audacity to write 477 slide long presentations and can keep the audience fascinated throughout each slide is a great storyteller. I discovered Rolf when he delivered a presentation in the Netherlands entitled "Web 2.0 why we got here and what's next". I went back to slideshare and looked at each of his slides. Rolf wasn't presenting us anything. He was telling us a story. He calls himself a pattern hound, and he has become one of my favorite blog writers. He doesn't write posts every day, but when he writes something it immediately sets you to think. Just take a look at a few titles of teh posts he has written. Makes you wanna read them right away don't they?

• the Facebook stalker and other urban myths
• why you'll pay to network
• 98% or even 100%-open: not enough in social networks
• delivering a useful luxury

Dig into his archives and start following him. There is a lot more to be discovered there ;-)

Michael Wesch

Michael is an assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. He and his students have created several video's that spread out like a firestorm over the Internet. He is a master in storytelling. What can I say, just watch his video's if you haven't already.

Conclusion

Storytellers are essential throughout times. Even in this digital age where every bit of information is available in digital form. Where all content is aggregated for you, ready to be consumed. But information isn't really what inspires us.

It's a bit like Neo in the Matrix, its the question that drives us, that inspires us. I just showed you three people that inspire me. People that make me think and ask questions. People that don't necessarily provide us with answers.

There are so many more of them out there. I am really curious to hear who is inspiring you. What are your favorite storytellers? Let me know.

It's unbelievably insightful.

This experiment was inspired by www.wefeelfine.org - An innovative social experiment by Jonathan Harris that I strongly recommend you check out, it's mind blowing!

Jonathan Harris' TED Talk is below.

3

First off, this Twitter search site Summize reminds me a little of Terraminds (now defunct?) but seemingly much better with more flexibility.

But what brought me to Summize was this: Twistori

I like the touchy-feely stuff. I'm a fan of PostSecret and I'm a qualitative researcher/ethnographer by trade, so, I'm intrigued by what Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs are doing with Twistori.  From what I can tell they are aggregating feelings from Twitter and bucketing them into 6 groups:

• love
• hate
• think
• believe
• feel
• wish

Click on one of the category links, wait a few secs and then the tweets start to scroll on your screen.  Some are funny, some sad, but the poignancy can't be denied. It's a quirky mirror into the souls of Twitter users and, by extension (alright well maybe, just perhaps), into the world at large.

Twistori is inspired by We Feel Fine.  Run by two interesting entrepreneurs - Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, We Feel Fine has been "harvesting human emotions from a large number of weblogs."

Sound interesting?

Well, take a tour of the site when you've got a chunk of time.  I say this because there is a lot of information in there, and it's not all immediately obvious. Figuring it out might take some time.  I'll be doing that sometime soon, and perhaps writing about it more in this space.

Basically We Feel Fine is "coding" feelings and summarizing them into statistics like the happiest and saddest cities, and more.  After reading about the mission and methodology, select the "Open We Feel Fine" link from the top navigation, that's where the action is. It'll search for feelings from the last few hours and then load them. Watch the bubbles/confetti on the screen, point your cursor and see where you end up. Then try it again. Click on the links at the bottom left to see information in different views, including images and summary statistics.

Ever wonder what people are thinking about? Well, here are a few ways to find out.

Quick Update: I forgot to mention that what led me to all of this was a tweet from @driveafastercar. I went to check out the pictures from ROFLcon at Laughing Squid (nice suit, BTW), and found a post on Twistori.

Last month, Read Write Web put together a great list of tools that do just that. From music to pictures to plain old data, there's a tool for everyone on this list.

One of my favorite artists that works in the world of data visualisation is Jonathan Harris. I remember how fascinated I was when I first saw his project We Feel Fine as he presented it at TED 2007. Together with Sep Kamvar, he has just released a new perspective of online dating for the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

I Want You to Want Me is a neat overview on the online dating phenomenon that does what great visualisation tools should - it provides creative, easily personalised perspectives on data, in an engaging way, and communicates information clearly using colors, shapes and other visual cues.

Roger W. Farnsworth

Kanye West, futurist. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
The Digital Ramble explores aesthetic topics through unconventional online materials.

What will the future look like? Imagining the possibilities is always more interesting than our true fate. Will neon 2.0 be released? Will toilet bowls play hologram ads? Will someday, perhaps as early as seven years from now, Nike release those "Back to the Future Part 2'' Air McFly’s? Sign the petition!

From mcfly2015.com.

If they do, I bet Kanye West will be the first to wear them, nanoseconds after posting them on his blog. West uses his blog to Magic-8 ball his fetishes: shake it a couple times a week and the future floats up, glowing radioactively, fabricated in Shanghai. His taste is eclectic, but always looking forward. How many other pop musicians — how many anybodies — brag they bought a stuffed Campana brothers chair?

Chair by Fernando and Humberto Campana.

One of the Web’s recent music innovations is the part-modern, part-retro and fully faux-plastic Muxtape, a Web site where you can create a mix tape online for your friends. The setup's legality is dubious, but at least you’re not letting your listeners download the music they’re listening to. [Editor: If The Moment's lawyers ever clear it, we'll post a Muxtape of our own. ...]

The future doesn’t always turn out how it’s supposed to be. But this November 1968 issue of Mechanix Illustrated shows that sometimes it comes close. Here are some things the magazine correctly predicted:

“Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees’ accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills… Computers not only keep track of money, they make spending it easier. TV-telephone shopping is common.”

But it also has us working four-hour days, and spending a lot more time underwater.

Perhaps how the future will look will depend on what we need. Apartments designed, for example, for motorcycle enthusiasts have a chic utilitarian appeal. Perhaps Kanye will buy one in 2057, commuting to and fro on his levitating Ducati?

(Hiroyasu Sakaguchi)

Norman Mailer had the bright idea to picture the future back in 1965, and he and his buddies did it completely in Lego. “Each Lego brick represents an apartment. There'd be something like twelve thousand apartments. The philosophers would live at the top. The call girls would live in the white bricks, and the corporate executives would live in the black.”

The only way I don’t like to see the future imagined is full of despair, since that’s how it’ll turn out anyway (and with a lot more realism than Spielberg’s snazziest CGI.) Picture a world where the digital overlords record your every thought and move. Do you really think you’ll be able to beat them with knitted armor?

What won’t change in the future is the search for love, though how we search will evolve. Jonathan Harris’s and Sep Kamvar’s recent installation for MoMA, “I Want You to Want Me” transforms an enormous amount of online dating profiles into balloons. Present or future, may all our digital soul exchanges occur in such an uplifting medium.

Jonathan Harris's and Sep Kamvar's "I Want You to Want Me" project at MoMa.