Via collega Martin Misseyer werd ik geattendeerd op onderstaand filmpje van Jonathan Harris, die een spreker was op TED.

Jonathan Harris wil zicht krijgen op de enorme diepte van het internet, één van zijn projecten is zijn project We Feel Fine (let op: bekijken van We Feel Fine vereist Java). Hoewel veel mensen het beschouwen als een ‘ordinaire’ zoekmachine, is We Feel Fine veel meer een kunstwerk.

In de missie van het project wordt duidelijk omschreven wat het eigenlijk is:

“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? […] 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.”

Een paar minuten kijken en klikken geeft een prachtig zicht op emotie in de virtuele wereld. Het maakte mij duidelijk waarom web 2.0 wél kans van slagen heeft, waarom het populair is en waarom het door zal gaan: nieuwe toepassingen maken het mogelijk te communiceren met echte mensen, die hun eigen emoties tonen en achter al die gepubliceerde sites, postings, filmpjes, foto’s, etc. zitten. Wat een mooie wereld in de ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ van iedere dag!