We Feel Fine: An Improvising Digital Art Masterpiece

Talking about our feelings have you ever imagined what would it be like to represent the aggregate feelings of all the human beings on this planet? Neither did I. But a digital programmer/artist Jonathan Harris did that and has accomplished to a certain degree (at least covering those who wrote their feelings online in their personal blogs) by creating a web-based program called “We Feel Fine.”

He considers himself as storyteller. He believes that the people all around the world are similar in many different ways but we all have trouble seeing that because we have gaps. The gap could be due to our language, ethnicity, wealth, religion, age, gender, sexuality, education etc. And we all try to define ourselves by those, despite of things which we have in common.

One of the things that is common to all of us is the very deep need to express ourselves. There’s nothing new about the self expression. We try to rectifying by various means such as creating art, writing poems, singing songs, scripting editorials and sending them into the newspaper, gossiping with friends. What's new about the way it is happening now is that it is happening through our expression on the Internet. People have been leaving behind foot-prints that give their moment of self expression.

He tries to bring those foot prints together via his program that collects the data representing feeling from many different sources across the Internet. Later the program interprets it graphically in the form of beautiful animation or the still photograph that tells the story. One of the cool features of the program is that it lets you view the result based on the feelings of the people falling only in certain demography -Such as the feelings of girls who are in their twenties. The summary of these types of data could be a very useful for different research purposes. Who knows, it might even solve the mystery of leading cause of suicides and will help to device the prevention instead of having many different specialists on this subject aiming in dark without such relevant information collected from the mass.

Here are some of the inspiring photographs that was generated by the program by linking thoughts with the pictures that are found in the same page.

www.flickr.com

You can view his presentation on 'We Feel Fine' at TED.com by clicking on the following link
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/144

To view Jonathan's complete works visit his website http://www.number27.org/.

Note: You need to have JAVA Runtime files installed on your computer in order to run the program 'We Feel Fine'. You can follow this link and click 'Download' button next to 'Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 2' to get the latest version.