Sunday, December 19, 2010

Feeling on a global scale!

Like many posts that haven't seen the light of day this one too was frozen in my cold storage drafts for a while now.Had come across this really unusual and interesting site a long time ago.
Its an amazing project created by #Jonathan Harris.I stumbled upon his #Tedtalk video recently and there are some points he made that jumped right out and caught my attention.


  •  We define ourselves by our gaps[be it educational,religion,income...]
  • We have a very deep need to express ourselves and with the internet and all the online media platforms,we now leave behind digital footprints of these moments of self expression

Heres the link to the video,its amazing how its able to capture human emotion so beautiful!!The correlation is fantastic!!We are all a part of so many social experiments we are unaware of!!





http://wefeelfine.org








It maps feelings on a global scale,their systems search blog posts for the phrase 'I am feeling' or 'i feel' every few minutes.Resulting in a database of over 15,000-20,000 new feelings everyday.


What i love about this site is the unique artful display of these feelings,instead of having a steady stream of feeling updates[say like a twitter feed or fb feed]they've come up a beautiful collage of bright coloured particles that represent a particular feeling posted by a single person.Click on a particle and it throws up the feeling and a picture!Their systems also organize the feeling wherein each particles colour,size,shape,opacity reflects the nature of the feeling.


The feelings are broadly classified into 6 movements




1.Madness
The madness movement is a birds eye view of humanity stripped of its walls feelings exposed.It is a movement with a networks of tiny colourful particles  designed to echo the human world. Seen from afar, Madness presents a massive number of individual particles, each colored and sized uniquely, each flying wildly around the screen, proclaiming its own individuality. 




2.Murmurs
Murmurs, the second movement, presents a highly structured environment in which to view human feelings. As this movement begins, every particle on screen gently floats upwards, eventually bouncing off the ceiling several times before settling. Then, one by one, the particles are excused from their attraction to the ceiling in order to join a simple scrolling list of human feelings, organized in reverse chronological order. The sentences appear letter by letter, as if being typed by their author, and fade to black as new sentences appear. 






3.Montage
Montage, the third movement, was created to answer questions like: what does sadness look like? Happiness? Loneliness?

Montage presents the feelings from a given population that contain photographs, and displays these photographs in a simple grid of variable size, depending on the number of photographs available. Any photograph in the grid can be clicked, causing it to zoom in to the size of the screen




4.Mobs
Mobs, the fourth movement, consists of five smaller movements, each of which utilizes a self-organizing particle system to configure its shape, color, distribution and physics to best express the different zeitgeists of: feeling, gender, age, weather, and geographical location.
Mobs (Feeling) displays the most common feelings in the sample population. In this movement, the particles self-organize into rows of shared feelings. The rows are sorted by the number of particles they contain, and the particles within each row are sorted by the length of the sentence that each particle contains. The rows are colored to inherit the chosen color of the feeling they represent. Any particle can be clicked to reveal the sentence within.




5.Metrics
Metrics, the fifth movement, consists of five smaller movements. Whereas Mobs expresses the notion of “Most Common”, Metrics expresses the notion of “Most Salient”. A full discussion of the difference between “Most Common” and “Most Salient” is here. Essentially, the traits listed in Metrics are those that best distinguish the sample population from the global average (i.e. how is this population different?). Metrics displays the most representative traits of the sample population, along five axes: feeling, gender, age, weather, and location.




6.Mounds
A small scrollbar below the mounds represents the entire database of feelings, and allows the viewer to jump to a specific point in the list. The viewer can also position the mouse near the left or right edge of the screen to cause the mounds list to self-scroll. Above each mound is listed its feeling, along with the rank of that feeling, and the total number of occurrences of that feeling contained in our database. Clicking the feeling above a mound retrieves feelings from people who feel that way.




Result a delightful artwork authored by the world!!reflecting our emotions,what's in our hearts and minds shrinking the world just a more.



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