The Work of Jonathan Harris

Work - Biography - News - Marginalia

Polaroid Project - 2008

Polaroid Project was created in two hours at a live art event, using 150 cut up Polaroid photos.

Three photographers were each given a Polaroid camera, 150 exposures, a bag of tools, an audience of 300 people dressed as grandmothers, and two hours in which to take and assemble the photographs into a mosaic, telling some kind of a story. The other participants were Elizabeth Weinberg and Joseph Holmes.

Starting in opposite corners are uncut pictures of a fully clothed man (bottom left / tinted blue) and a fully clothed woman (top right / tinted pink). Both genders twist towards the center along curved paths, discarding clothes, wigs, shoes, and other accessories along the way, as the photos start to shatter, becoming less about objects and more about flesh. Approaching the center, the pictures are increasingly difficult to discern, as body parts blend together and their owners' identities dissolve. Throughout the piece, the male and female cut marks are symmetric, mirrored copies of each other, extending beyond the boundaries of the photographs into the white border, itself composed of the individual white borders of all 150 Polaroids, so that the whole canvas comes to resemble a single giant Polaroid exposure.

This project was assisted by Kyla Fullenwider.

polaroidproject.org | Event photos | PHTHRD

I Want You To Want Me - 2008

I Want You To Want Me explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating.

Over the past several years, online dating has entered the mainstream, drawing over 50 million visitors per month.  En masse, people have condensed their identities into page or paragraph-long descriptions, sometimes complemented by a handful of photographs or peppered with responses to canned questions.  These personal profiles are modern messages in a bottle, short statements of self, telling not only who people are, but also what people want.  In these advertisements for new human relationships, people package and present their most loveable qualities to help complete their quest to be loved.

I Want You To Want Me chronicles the world’s long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, gathering new data from a variety of online dating sites every few hours.  The system searches these sites for certain phrases, which it then collects and stores in a database.  These phrases, taken out of context, provide partial glimpses into people’s private lives.  Simultaneously, the system forms an evolving zeitgeist of dating, tracking the most popular first dates, turn-ons, desires, self-descriptions and interests.

The data is presented as an interactive installation, displayed on a 56” high-resolution touch screen, hung vertically on a wall in a dark room.  On screen is an interactive sky, whose weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy, snowy, etc.) can be controlled by the viewer.  Through the sky float hundreds of blue (male) and pink (female) balloons, each representing a single dating profile.  The brighter balloons are younger people; the darker balloons older.  Trapped inside each balloon is one of over 500 video silhouettes, showing a solitary person, engaged in any number of activities (yoga, jumping jacks, nose-picking, air guitar, etc.).  The viewer can touch any balloon to select it, causing its photo to dangle from a string and its sentence to appear in a thought bubble overhead.  Touching any balloon a second time pops it.  The balloons move through the sky along different paths and at different speeds, bumping up against each other, sometimes traveling together for a time, but only ever getting so close, as each silhouette is ultimately confined to its own balloon.

I Want You To Want Me aims to be a mirror, in which people see reflections of themselves as they glimpse the lives of others.

It was commissioned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art for their Design and the Elastic Mind show, and is a collaboration with Sep Kamvar.

The piece was installed at MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine’s Day.

iwantyoutowantme.org | Statement | Movements | Process

The Whale Hunt - 2007

The Whale Hunt is a storytelling experiment.

In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States. The first several days were spent in the village of Barrow, exploring ramshackle structures, buying gear, and otherwise helping the whaling crew to prepare for the hunt. We then traveled by snowmobile out onto the frozen Arctic Ocean, where we camped three miles from shore on thick pack ice, pitching our tents about ten feet from the open water. Boats were readied, harpoons prepared, whaling guns loaded, white tunics donned, a snow fence constructed, and then we sat silently in the -22 °F air, in constant daylight, waiting for whales to appear.

A thousand-year-old tradition, the Inupiat whale hunt provides the community’s annual food supply, currently limited by international law to 22 whales a year. Each spring as the ocean thaws, ice breaks away from the mainland as a single massive chunk, which then floats out to sea, creating a canal of open water called the "lead". It is through this lead that Bowhead whales migrate north to the Arctic Circle, where they spend summers, surfacing for air every 30-45 minutes en route. We saw hundreds of whales on the horizon, but most were too far away to attack. Finally on the fourth day two whales (each 36 feet long and weighing around 40 tons) were harpooned, hauled up onto the ice using a block and tackle system that resembles a giant tug of war between man and sea, and summarily butchered, the meat and blubber then distributed to the Barrow community.

I documented the entire experience with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat.

The purpose of this project was threefold:

First, to experiment with a new interface for human storytelling. The photographs are presented in a framework that tells the moment-to-moment story of the whale hunt. The full sequence of images is represented as a medical heartbeat graph along the bottom edge of the screen, its magnitude at each point indicating the photographic frequency (and thus the level of excitement) at that moment in time. A series of filters can be used to restrict this heartbeat timeline, isolating the many sub-stories occurring within the larger narrative (the story of blood, the story of the captain, the story of the arctic ocean, etc.). Each viewer will experience the whale hunt narrative differently, and not necessarily in a linear fashion, constructing his or her own understanding of the experience.

Second, to subject myself to the same sort of incessant automated data collection process that I usually write computer programs to conduct (in previous projects like We Feel Fine, Lovelines, Universe, 10x10, and Phylotaxis). Much effort is spent making computers understand what it’s like to be human (through data mining and artificial intelligence), but rarely do humans try to see things from a computer’s perspective. I was interested in reaching some degree of empathy with the computer, a constant thankless helper in my work.

Third, to take an epic personal experience from the physical world and translate it optimally to the Internet, so that many people can share it.

I am grateful to Andrew Moore, a New York based friend and photographer who accompanied me on the trip, and to the Patkotak family of Barrow, Alaska, for their generosity in welcoming us into their house and later into their whaling camp. The Whale Hunt is really their story.

thewhalehunt.org | Statement | Highlights | Interface

Universe - 2007

Whether we live in a city, where the night sky bleeds orange with the glow of cars and buildings, or whether we live in the country, where the night sky is pitch black, punctured by myriad tiny points of light, we have all, on a dark night, tilted our head back and looked up. Most of us can spot the North Star, the big dipper, and the three-star belt of Orion the Hunter. With some more practice, we can see Pisces, Pegasus, and the Gemini twins. Each night, the great stories of ancient Greek mythology are played out in the sky — Perseus rescues Andromeda from the sea monster; Orion faces the roaring bull; Zeus battles Cronos for control of Mount Olympus. Most of us know the sky holds these great myths, immortalized as constellations. Slightly less well known are the newer constellations, largely added in the 18th and 19th centuries. These more modern constellations reflect a different sort of mythology — a commemoration of art and science, expressed through star groups representing technical inventions like the microscope, the triangle, the compass, the level, and the easel.

As humans, we have a long history of projecting our great stories into the night sky. This leads us to wonder: if we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict? These questions form the inspiration for Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations. It is easy to think that the world today is devoid of mythology. We obsess over celebrities, music, movies, fashion and trends, changing madly from one moment to the next, causing our heroes and idols to come and go so quickly that no consistent mythology can take root. Especially for those who don't practice religion, it can seem there is nothing bigger in which to believe, that there is no shared experience that unites the human world, no common stories to guide us. Because of this, we are said to feel a great emptiness.

We can imagine that people first made constellations to humanize the sky, to make the infinite darkness seem less foreboding. Now that we live in cities of light, bathed in the glow of televisions, headlights, shops, signs, and streetlamps, our battle with darkness seems to be won. But the things that darkness represents — the unknown, the unconquered, and the endless — live on as ever, and we continue to need mythology to help us reconcile that which science and technology cannot answer. So, what is the mythology of today? What are the great stories? What are the great journeys? Who are the heroes and villains? When we step back and look at life, what are its overarching themes? We could ask a panel of experts, or as before, we could leave it to a few ambitious astronomers. But those approaches no longer seem right. Even as we participate in the human world, each of us experiences life differently. We have our own interests, perspectives, opinions, tastes and beliefs. We have our own heroes, our own favorite stories, our own rituals and traditions. In many ways, what we have today are personal mythologies, practiced by a world of individuals.

Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone's path through Universe is different, just as everyone's path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world — a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place — and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.

Universe is divided into nine "Stages", titled: Stars, Shapes, Secrets, Stories, Statements, Snapshots, Superstars, Settings, and Time. Stars presents a cryptic star field; Shapes causes constellation outlines to emerge; Secrets extracts the most salient single words and presents them to scale; Stories extracts the sagas and events; Statements extracts the things people said; Snapshots extracts images; Superstars extracts the people, places, companies, teams, and organizations; Settings shows geographical distribution; Time shows how the universe has evolved over hours, days, months, and years. In the top left corner is a search box, which can be used to specify the scope of the current universe. The scope can be as broad as "2007", as recent as "Today", as precise as "Vermont on August 27, 2006", or as open-ended as "War", "Climate Change" or "Happiness". The exact parameters of each universe are entirely up to the viewer, and unexpected paths unfold with exploration.

Universe does not suggest a single shared mythology. Instead, it provides a tool to explore many personal mythologies. Based on the chosen path of the viewer, Universe presents the most salient stories, statements and snapshots, as found in global news coverage from thousands of sources. Through this process of guided discovery, patterns start to emerge. Certain stories show up again and again, and they become our great sagas. Certain people start to shape the news, and they become our heroes and villains. Certain single words rise from the chatter, and they become our epic themes.

In Universe, as in reality, everything is connected. No event happens in isolation. No company exists in a vacuum. No person lives alone. Whereas news is often presented as a series of unrelated static events, Universe strives to show the broader narrative that contains those events. The only way to begin to see the mythic nature of today's world is to surface its connections, patterns, and themes. When this happens, we begin to see common threads — myths, really — twisting through the stream of information.

universe.daylife.com | Statement | Stages | Daylife

Time Capsule - 2006

A tradition as old as cave art, one of the most primal human traits is the need for self-expression. We make drawings and paintings, take photos, sing songs, write stories and poems, keep blogs, build and decorate houses, buy and wear clothing, write memoirs. We do these things to become individuals, to fight anonymity and the passage of time.

These days, life is lived in short bursts. We dart madly from the house to the car to the train to the office. We check email, voicemail, headlines, and stocks. We absorb web sites, TV, radio, music, movies and gossip, desperately try to keep up. We maintain this crazy pace, tumbling through our 80 years, obsessed with the present, rarely pausing to consider the full arc of life, much less the arc of many lives, lived across many generations. As we dash through our days, expressing ourselves in countless ways, leaving thick trails of footprints, we seldom stop and think about those footprints. We rarely consider the legacy we are leaving behind. But what if we did? What if we were each to choose a small handful of precious thoughts and artifacts to represent our life – a few words, a few pictures, perhaps a drawing or two – and were to put them away somewhere safe, as keepsakes for the future?

It is this ability to shape the way we will be remembered that makes time capsules so appealing. Time capsules have a storied past, stretching back to the first known literary work, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which opens with a hunt for a manuscript hidden in the walls of Uruk. The great pyramids of Egypt and Mexico are also time capsules of a sort, containing relics of ancient eras. The ruins at Pompeii, buried in ash for more than 1,600 years, formed an unintentional but impeccable time capsule depicting city life at the height of the Roman Empire. The modern time capsule was born amid preparations for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, when Westinghouse constructed an 800-pound metal ball, which it then filled with everyday items and buried underground.

Building on this colorful heritage, the Yahoo! Time Capsule sets out to collect a portrait of the world – a single global image composed of thousands of individual contributions. This time capsule is defined not by the few items a curator decides to include, but by the items submitted by every human on earth who wishes to participate. We hope to reach a truly global expression of life on earth – nuanced, diverse, beautiful and ugly, thrilling and terrifying, touching and rude, serious and absurd, frank, honest, human.

The Time Capsule itself is realized digitally so that the maximum number of people can have access. It is organized around ten basic ideas, chosen to illuminate different corners of the human experience. They are: Love, Sorrow, Anger, Faith, Beauty, Fun, Past, Hope, Now, and You. Each idea harbors an open-ended question: What do you love? What makes you sad? What makes you angry? What do you believe in? What’s beautiful? What’s fun? What do you remember? What is your wish? Describe your world. Who are you? People respond to these questions in five simple ways – with words, pictures, videos, sounds, and drawings.

The aesthetic of the Time Capsule is that of a ball of thread, spinning like a globe, its shifting surface entirely composed of words and pictures submitted by people around the world. The thread ball concept relates to threads of memory and threads of time, where threads are taken to be any continuous and self-consistent narrative strand. When the Time Capsule opens, it displays the 100 most recent contributions, which form the spinning globe. The ten themes orbit the globe in a pinwheel pattern. At any moment, any individual tile can be clicked, causing the globe to fall away and the selected tile to expand, revealing detailed information about the tile and the person who created it. Using a search interface, viewers can specify the population they wish to see, exploring such demographics as “men in their 20s from New York City”, and “Iraqi women who submitted drawings in response to the question: What do you love?”. There are an infinite number of ways to slice the data, and each resulting slice then becomes its own thread, which can be browsed independently, tile by tile, like a filmstrip.

The contribution process is designed to be simple and universal, using minimal gestures to create words and drawings, and to upload files. Though translated into ten languages, there are very few textual instructions anywhere in the piece, so the experience is necessarily one of exploration and discovery. A clock counts down constantly in the bottom left corner, approaching the moment the Time Capsule will close.

The presiding message of the Time Capsule is: “One World. Many Voices.” The piece attempts simultaneously to express the differences between individuals, and to illustrate the shared ground between people of all ages, races, backgrounds and cultures.

timecapsule.yahoo.com (now closed) | Reflections on the Time Capsule | Photos of New Mexico event | Facts

We Feel Fine - 2006

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion.

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? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? 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.

We Feel Fine is a collaboration with Sepandar Kamvar, and was launched simultaneously with Lovelines on May 8, 2006.

www.wefeelfine.org

Lovelines - 2006

Lovelines is an exploration of human desire.

Through large scale blog analysis, Lovelines illuminates the topography of the emotional landscape between love and hate, as experienced by countless normal humans keeping personal online journals.

Using a data collection engine created by the artists for their recent collaboration, We Feel Fine, Lovelines examines thousands of blogs every few minutes to find expressions of love and hate, posted by all manner of people. When it can, Lovelines identifies and saves the age, gender, and geographical location of the person who wrote the post, and then presents that information along with the post. The entries range from frivolous to profound, offering a glimpse into the hearts and minds of people blogging about their wants and needs.

Lovelines presents a stark white screen, bounded on the bottom by a slider running from “Love” to “Hate”, with a draggable heart that becomes scratched out to the point of illegibility as the heart approaches “Hate”. As the slider is pulled through Love, Like, Want, Indifference, Dislike, and Hate, words and pictures appear above to represent the chosen state of desire or despair.

Lovelines is structured around three movements: “Words”, “Pictures”, and “Superlatives”. Words and Pictures iteratively present individual examples of human desire, while Superlatives provides a daily zeitgeist of the most loved, wanted, liked, and hated things. Interactive timelines represent the changing magnitude of love and hate over time, and allow navigation into the past.

The artists were invited to make this piece by Oral Fixation Mints, a breath mint company devoted to “making everyday objects beautiful”, of which Jonathan Harris is a co-founder. We realize that the heart of all fixations is the desire to own, possess, and consume. Great desires imitate the physics of giant pendulums: the higher they rise, the deeper they fall. In this sense, love is inextricably tied to hate, desire to despair. Lovelines walks the line between these two extremes, painting pictures of the shifting landscape of desire.

Constructed entirely from found artifacts – words and pictures posted to blogs – Lovelines draws its identity from a world of strangers, brought together by shared degrees of desire.

Lovelines is a collaboration with Sepandar Kamvar, and was launched simultaneously with We Feel Fine on May 8, 2006.

www.love-lines.com | www.oralfix.com/lovelines

Phylotaxis - 2005

Phylotaxis was developed for Seed Magazine, as an expression of the space where science meets culture.

Its structure, derived from the Fibonacci Sequence and closely related to the Golden Ratio, is one of nature's most elegant. The Fibonacci Sequence is the set of numbers where each number is the sum of the previous two numbers. This simple sequence governs phenomena as diverse as the petal arrangement of roses, the breeding patterns of rabbits, and the shape of our galaxy. It is also evident in the design of the Great Pyramids, the composition of the Mona Lisa, and the construction of Stradivarius violins.

Related to the Fibonacci Sequence, Phylotaxis (Phyllos - leaf, Taxis - order) is the study of the ordered position of leaves on a plant stem, and also applies to the shape of pinecones, and the dispersion of seeds on the flat head of a sunflower.

Phylotaxis illustrates the delicate balance between science and culture in our world. Without the randomness of culture, science becomes dry and predictable, imprisoned in a strict square grid. Without the rational thinking of science, culture quickly teeters towards chaos. Only when science and culture act as peers can harmony be achieved, expressed through the astonishing Phylotaxis shape.

The individual beads of the Phylotaxis represent an ever-changing zeitgeist of science news in our world, populated automatically every few hours by a computer program that scours a slew of online news sources and blogs that focus on science. The Phylotaxis is therefore beyond human control, autonomously composing its own new identity, based on what's happening in the world of science.

The color makeup of Seed's insignia changes as the Phylotaxis changes, each dot taking on the average color of its corresponding Phylotaxis photograph, and then quivering with Brownian Motion. In this way, the identity of Seed constantly reflects the identity of science.

www.phylotaxis.com

justcurio.us - 2005

justcurio.us is an anonymous question and answer system, open to anyone, with one simple rule: to ask a question, you must first answer someone else's question. Question yields answer yields question. Strangers helping strangers.

The questions can be about anything the best Beatles album, your saddest moment, your biggest regret, your best childhood memory, the meaning of life, whether you should break up with your girlfriend, the best crepe place in Paris, the best cure for loneliness. Anything at all. This is our chance to lean on each other, to look to a stranger for help, to discover what other people think.

justcurio.us is entirely confidential, allowing anyone to ask and answer questions with complete anonymity. So, what's on your mind?

justcurio.us is a collaboration with Robert Kalin.

www.justcurio.us

Art of Science Competition - 2005

The inaugural Art of Science Competition at Princeton University celebrates the aesthetics of science and the experimental nature of data-driven artwork. This nexus of artistic and scientific creativity holds a special place in my heart, as those two worlds inform much of my own work. I was honored to help design and organize the first annual Art of Science Competition at Princeton. Over the next few years, we hope to grow the competition into an international forum for scientific artwork, in all its manifestations.

www.princeton.edu/artofscience | Gallery

Yahoo! Netrospective - 2005

To celebrate the first ten years of the Interent, Yahoo! selected the top 100 moments of the web from 1995 to 2005. I worked with Yahoo! to develop "Yahoo Netrospective: 10 years, 100 Moments", the commemorative microsite, the design and functionality of which was inspired by 10x10.

birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective

Fabrica - 2005

Fabrica is Benetton's creative think tank, located in northern Italy. I recently spent a year at Fabrica, towards the end of which I was asked to remake Fabrica's website. The site explores notions of order and chaos, control and changeability. A simple grid-based design allows the work to communicate without distraction. Fabrica fellows, past and present, can create project cards using a simple web interface, and their projects then appear on the site's front page. The Fabrica logo changes to reflect the most recently posted project, literally transforming the identity of Fabrica with each new piece of work. Any visitor to the site can scrawl graffiti on any project page, for all future visitors to see. In this way, any project is vulnerable to praise, criticism, or mockery, and any visitor to the Fabrica site becomes both a critic and an artist. An IP address locator logs the country where each graffiti is created, expressing the global outlook of Fabrica, whose community of artists stretches worldwide.

www.fabrica.it | Graffiti Archive | My Fabrica Projects

10x10 - 2004

10x10 ('ten by ten') is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10x10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.

10x10 is ever-changing, ever-growing, quietly observing the ways in which we live. It records our wars and crises, our triumphs and tragedies, our mistakes and milestones. When we make history, or at least the headlines, 10x10 takes note and remembers.

Each hour is presented as a picture postcard window, composed of 100 different frames, each of which holds the image of a single moment in time. Clicking on a single frame allows us to peer a bit deeper into the story that lies behind the image. In this way, we can dart in and out of the news, understanding both the individual stories and the ways in which they relate to each other.

10x10 runs with no human intervention, autonomously observing what a handful of leading international news sources are saying and showing. 10x10 makes no comment on news media bias, or lack thereof. It has no politics, nor any secret agenda; it simply shows what it finds.

With no human editors and no regulation, 10x10 is open and free, raw and fresh, and consequently a unique way of following world events. In 10x10, we respond instinctively to patterns in the grid, visual indicators of relevance. When we see a frequently repeated image, we know it’s important. When we see a picture of a movie star next to a picture of dead bodies, we understand the extremes that exist in our world. Scanning a grid of pictures can be more intuitive than reading headlines, for it lets the news come to life, and everything feels a bit less distant, a bit closer to heart, and maybe, if we're lucky, gives us pause to think. If you'd like to learn more about 10x10, you can read how it works.

www.tenbyten.org | 10x10 Video: Full (9.2mb) Small (3.3mb)

WordCount - 2004

WordCount is an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked and scaled in order of commonness and arranged side by side as a very long sentence. Each word's size reflects its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC. In the future, WordCount will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet.

WordCount was designed with a minimalist aesthetic, to let the information speak for itself. The interface is clean, basic and intuitive. The goal is for the user to feel embedded in the language, sifting through words like an archaeologist through sand, awaiting the unexpected find. Observing closely ranked words tells us a great deal about our culture. For instance, "God" is one word from "began", two words from "start" , and six words from "war". Another sequence is "america ensure oil opportunity". Conspiracists unite! As ever, the more one explores, the more is revealed.

www.wordcount.org | QueryCount | Conspiracy | 1970s Name Game

Understanding Vorn - 2004

Understanding Vorn is an artwork in flux. Every five minutes it scours thousands of weblogs, searching for the four most recently posted pictures that begin with the letters 'V', 'O', 'R', 'N'. Every five minutes, Understanding Vorn changes, filled with fresh words and pictures from the blogosphere.

The chaotic, unpredictable nature of Understanding Vorn reflects the chaotic, unpredictable nature of Germany's VORN Magazine, which commissioned the piece. VORN Magazine invites artists to create work, and then publishes whatever they create, no matter how good, bad, or strange. VORN Magazine is a collage of imagery from a diversity of creative minds, each with its own style, and its own worldview. In the same way, Understanding Vorn unites unrelated creators: blog writers publishing their pictures and thoughts. When picked by the program, these blog writers experience the artist's 5 minutes of fame, their work shown in the VORN grid. Then, minutes later, their work vanishes, as a new crop is chosen.

The harsh impermanence of this system stands in stark contrast to a magazine, which is obsessed with collecting and archiving. Understanding Vorn is about experiencing and forgetting, reflecting the transient intangibility of the online reality. From the chaos can emerge extreme ugliness and extreme beauty, but the lack of premeditation makes it all very human. Understanding Vorn has seen suicide notes, sex pictures, and love letters, but these poignant moments inevitably get swallowed by time, as the program advances, obsessed with finding what's new.

Currently, Understanding Vorn culls its data from Flickr, and from over 800,000 LiveJournal weblogs, whose authors are primarily teenagers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Russia. Take their posts for what they are: the spontaneous musings of teens given a platform to speak their minds. The posts are often silly, sometimes sad, sometimes scary, occasionally moving, but always very candid, very real.

www.understandingvorn.org | Vorn Magazine

ThreatMeter - 2004

A satirical website, representing a fictitious company called "ThreatMeter.com", desperately trying to profit from America's fear of terrorism. In collaboration with Joel Gethin Lewis of United Visual Artists.

www.threatmeter.com

Information Maps - 2003

Centered at Princeton University, the International Networks Archive is a global alliance of scholars who believe that geography is becoming increasingly irrelevant. INA is developing a new way of mapping our world, based on global transactions instead of geography. I helped INA develop its experimental mapping philosophy, and the way it merges data, maps and technology.

Information Maps | Non-Geographic Mapping

Troubadour Magazine - 2001 - 2003

Founded at Princeton University to counteract post-September 11 xenophobia among Americans, and to revive politcal debate on campus, Troubadour uses literature, photography and artwork to raise awareness about world issues, illustrating the common ground shared by all races and cultures. Driven by the motto, "To Become Scholars of Each Other's Experience", the magazine uses personal travel narratives to inspire cross-cultural dialogue. Each issue of Troubadour is centered around a unifying theme, such as "Empire", "Evildoers", and "Pirates".

Troubadour's national awards include "Best Online Student Magazine" and "Best Overall Student Magazine" from the American Society of Professional Journalists. As founder, editor, and art director of Troubadour for its first three editions, I oversaw the magazine's transition from a fledgling start-up to its current position as Princeton's primary literary outlet for students and professors.

troubadour magazine

Commercial Work - 1999 - Present

A rundown of my commercial design work from the past several years is here.

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