This Art Exhibit Turns Tweets Into A Beautiful Sphere Of Emotion
With 350,000 tweets sent every minute, it's impossible to keep track of all the emotions every Twitter user conveys. The Fuse Studio want to change that with an art installation named "Amygdala," which crunches up to 30 tweets per second and visually translates each into one of six emotions: Happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, amazement or fear.
The results of this sentiment analysis are displayed on 41 LED bars in the CUBO Centro Unipol in Bologna, Italy's Media Garden via 125,952 lights, wired together with 2 miles of fibre-optic cable. Fair to say the fountain-like pattern of lights look absolutely incredible (flick through the photos over there on the left), with bright bursts during busy periods and a calm stream for the down times.
This data is processed every 10 minutes and sent to 12 video walls inside. The six emotions are presented as specific colours and sounds, to represent the harmony and discordance the Twitterverse goes through at all hours of the day. According to Fuse, this project shows "the evolution of the global emotional state ... which will go on to form the emotional memory of the three months in which Amygdala will be deployed."
You have to check out the video below of it in action. It's utterly beautiful.
AMYGDALA listens to shared thoughts, interprets states of mind and translates the data gathered into an audiovisual installation capable of representing the collective emotional state of the net and its changes on the basis of events that take place around the world. The aim is to make visible the flow of data and information that are constantly being created by users, and that may be heard and interpreted by anyone, in the attempt to stimulate a reflection on the opportunities and dangers of the digital revolution that we are currently going through. Big Data may in fact be used to monitor the spread of an epidemic in real time, or to prevent a crime and improve the safety of a city; likewise, they may also be exploited by companies and institutions to store – often unknown to us – infinite quantities of information on our own private lives. We believe that gaining awareness of these mechanisms may be of help in the protection of individual and collective free speech. More info on http://fuseworks.it/en/project/amygdala/