JOSIEN NIEBUUR
#FEED ME is an interactive installation that is being continuously fed by social media, more specific the #hashtags used in twitter messages. The increasing amount of collected #hashtag data will be visualized in a physical interactive expanding construction. In the project there will be an uncontrollable amount of information that is growing and reflecting on the process of constantly feeding ourselves with information, both consuming and producing. How do you visualise ‘infobesitas’? The art project will explore and poses these questions about the system that we are actively taking part in, visualised by the dynamics in the installation.
Nowadays people are connecting to the Internet and are given the ability to produce as well as consume the information on it. ‘Library of Babel’, by Jorge Luis Borges, is a story in which he describes an infinite library containing all possible books.‘Library of Babel’ seems eerily predictive of todays internet, which we can think of as a sort of digital ‘total library’ containing a growing amount of valuable information as well as junk. Will we as users experience difficulties to deal with this thriving growth? Will we loose our personal voice, our story in this vortex of information?
The physical sculptural part of the installation will exist out of lightweight fabric or other lightweight material. Threads will be attached to this sculpture/installation. The threads can a be pulled up by this mechanical construction with stepper-motors. In this way the construction can for example be lifted, lowered or expanded. A big THANK YOU to Barry Nijkeuter who helped me designing and constructing this mechanical thread pulley system.
A big THANK YOU to Manno Bult who wrote the Java code, establishing the link between the twitter stream and Max Msp Jitter. Max Msp Jitter allows you to write custom objects in, among others, Java. In this case Java was used to read the Twitter statuses stream with the aid of the fantastic Twitter4J library which is released under the Apache License 2.0. Writing the plugin was done with the aid of the Max Msp Jitter documentation as well as some help from Eva Schindling’s blog. Thus the custom Java max object reads a filtered twitter stream and passes the relevant contents to the outlets of the object. Max Msp Jitter in it’s turn deals with that output anyway I see fit