Becky Hurwitz

(warning: this is causing my browsers to crash on mac 10.6.2; they are loading fine on windows)

The Dumpster, by Golan Levin, with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg for the Whitney and the Tate online gallery, 2006

http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/thedumpster/

The Dumpster by Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg for the Tate and Whitney online gallery

This piece is amusing and good looking.  From a usability perspective, the interface is not very intuitive and from a visualization perspective, the various tools for visualizing aspects of the data in the set are not very effective.  But, I’m inclined to say — who cares?  It’s amusing and good looking.

This is a data set of 20,000 blog posts from 2005 made by teens discussing their breakups.  Millions of blogs were analyzed for content about breakups and these posts were selected.  In addition to the text of entries, the set includes demographic data about authors — gender, age and NLP based data about the type of breakup, and emotions expressed by the authors.

One of the goals of the visualization is to represent emotional content as data without emotional value.  It does feel sort of removed — clicking on a breakup displays blog entry text, but I don’t feel empathy for the writer, partially, I think, because the writer is represented by a vibrating orange blob and not with a face or any context.  Also partially because the blob-person is one of 200 in the main window and one of 20,000 in the pixel view to the left.  These blobs don’t seem like distinct individuals but a small part of the group of 20,000.  The bits of the blog entries mentioning the breakups are often full of emotions that are clearly fleeting — meanness, anger, sadness, relief — I feel sort of embarrassed that blogging about a breakup as a teen could mean freezing reactions in perpetuity in this piece and because some of these posts are deeply petty.  Some of these expressions feel familiar enough that I feel embarrassed for me and not just for the writers.  That, to me, is funny.

AND, if you want to geek out about the theory behind this, the statements the artists are trying to make about individuals in society, the emergence of what the Tate and the Whitney dubbed “net art” — there are a lot of essays on the site and around the net.