Digg This Story   Sep 15 07

/ by tony schibono

We feel fine is an exploration in human emotions. An experimental flash site by digital artists Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar. It harvests 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 and mapped visually to a dynamic flash based visualization.

Information harvesting and re-purposing represents a significant step in technological advancement. It begins to identify the emergence of a global consciousness, through the collective effort of the web participation. The standard structures of xml data is enabling information to be contextualized in infinite number of methods, thus growing more complex and dense, much like the organic systems we see in nature. The possibilities for the contextualization of information is becoming fractal, and is enabling machines to make informed decisions about anything.

If this isn't a sign of the coming of an artificial intelligence, I don't know what is...