Jonathan Harris, a digital artist who comes from a programming background has changed the way I think about the web and digital storytelling. His bio says, "He makes projects that reimagine how humans relate to technology and to each other." I am most interested in the way that he chooses to visualize information. As technology rapidly evolves and people get more involved with machines, it seems that today's artists deal with a sort of anticipation and anxiety about how fast things can change and how quickly we must adapt in order to keep up. Harris's work comments directly on this as he works on issues of isolation, the passing of time, history, and in one project (I Want You to Want Me) the world of online dating and the way that people portray themselves through the internet in order to find a "perfect match" amidst all the chaos. He has a very keen eye for design and has revolutionized the idea of a web page for me, making it a canvas with no boundaries. Here are a few of my favorite of his projects that I think do an incredible job of connecting design and technology, visual and interactive--people and machines!
Harris writes, "{We Feel Fine} continually harvests sentences containing the phrase "I feel" or "I am feeling" from the Internet's newly posted blog entries, saves them in a database, and displays them in an interactive Java applet, which runs in a web browser. Each dot represents a single person's feeling. The color of each dot corresponds to the type of feeling it represents (bright dots are happy, dark dots are sad), and the diameter of each dot indicates the length of the sentence inside. Demographic information (age, gender, location, and weather) is also collected and displayed. Photo montages with text / image overlays are automatically constructed from photographs and feeling sentences that occur in the same blog entry. We Feel Fine collects around 15,000 new feelings per day, and has saved over 13 million feelings since 2005, forming a constantly evolving portrait of human emotion."
"Phylotaxis"
Seed Magazine commissioned this project and Harris writes, "Phylotaxis presents the world's latest science news as an interactive particle system, consisting of many small dots, each representing a single piece of science news, chosen automatically by a computer program scouring the web. Phylotaxis is therefore beyond human control, autonomously composing its own new identity every few hours, based on what's happening in the world of science." I love the idea that this project is a living organism that no person controls and therefore it is different every time for every viewer, an ever changing and evolving database of information and visualization much like the field of science itself.
"Whale Hunt"
"I documented their traditional whale hunt with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, taken at five-minute intervals for seven days, and at even higher frequencies in moments of high adrenaline. This established a constant "photographic heartbeat" that more or less matched the changing pace of my own heartbeat, and which recorded every moment of the hunt. I then developed a framework for experiencing this story, allowing the viewer to rearrange the photographic elements of the story to extract multiple sub-stories focused around different people, places, topics, and other variables."
From a photographer's point of view, I particularly like the different ways that he gives for you to view the images. This type of user determined interactivity to control the look and feel of the total viewing experience is one of the things that he does best -- it feels like the future.
"10X10"
"Every hour, 10x10 automatically selects the top 100 words and pictures in the world, based on what's happening in the news. It then presents these words and pictures in an interactive ten by ten grid, and allows navigation to past grids, so that history becomes browse-able. In this way, these hourly snapshots, when stitched together, form a continuous photographic tapestry of human life."
Leave a comment