New Media Exploration - Artist Jonathan Harris

The goal of classic art, poetry and literature has always been to connect with people and to convey an idea, an emotion or a philosophy. The growth of the internet and its ability to interactively engage the viewer with multi-media content, presents new opportunities for connecting with people and digesting the huge amount of information being posted on the web in ways not imagined twenty years ago. There are some creative people are now fashioning new and very innovative ways of sorting through the web's content. Jonathan Harris is one of those people Jonathan's web site can be found at: http://www.number27.org/


The introduction on Jonathan's web page tells what his work is all about - he creates projects that "reimagine how we relate to our machines and to each other."


Karl briefly introduced us to Jonathan Harris' work a few months ago with quick looks at "The Whale Hunt" and "We Feel Fine". I would like to briefly re-visit a small portion of Jonathan Harris' work.

"We Feel Fine" really captured my imagination when I first saw it in class. I thought the concept of trolling the web for blog posts expressing feelings and then creating an interface to interact with, measure, or view those feelings was a very creative concept. The program looks at recent blog posts for the words "I feel" or "I am feeling" and then captures the sentence and categorizes it based upon about 5,000 pre-identified feelings.

You can then sort through the different methods of compiling the data and see the pulse of how the group "feels" at any one time. In the "murmurs" movement one can chase down a feeling based upon its color and see the remainder of the sentence. If the user is interested in the context of the sentence, then a link will take the user to the blog post. The "mobs" page will sort the feelings according to their frequency. The "metrics" page will give you a relative snapshot of the sampled feelings.

Jonathan's work "10 X 10" sorts through the RSS feeds of the BBC, New York Times and CNN to harvest the 100 most frequently used words and images during a day. Those words and images are posted on the 10 X 10 site in hourly snapshots. You can then browse back in time to see the words and images that were most used by the sources during that hour.

Lastly, the "I Want You to Want Me" project [ http://iwantyoutowantme.org/index.html ], which captures personal profiles of people participating in on-line dating services was also a very creative and interesting concept. The project was commissioned by the New York Museum of Modern Art.

The program searches through the profiles and breaks the sentences down into categories such as "who I am", "what I want", opening lines, and closing lines. The user can then sort through and view the profiles. The program also attempts to pair the profiles based upon their description of who they are and what they are looking for.

Here is a link to a short bio of Jonathan Harris: http://iwantyoutowantme.org/credits.html

I have been very impressed with the creativity [and programming skills] expressed in Jonathan's work. Some of his other works are too abstract for my old brain to grasp and I don't understand the point he is trying to make. Perhaps further contemplation of those works will result in a deeper understanding.

For me Jonathan's work is an excellent example of what is possible with the "new media" and the tools that are available to explore our collective humanity.

Please visit Jonathan's site, look at his projects and enjoy: http://www.number27.org/index.html