My career has a whole has been comprised of two distinct pieces: the web/technology driven side, and the art studio side; the art side having existed all along, became a career as soon as I was aware of myself needing one. It wasnt, however, one that would support me for years. It was for this reason that I began to learn web development, in order to market myself, at the very least, and hopefully expedite the process of my getting discovered by a collector or gallery that would lead to happily ever after. As it tends to happen, at least for artists, the skills I acquired in my search for building myself a website became job-marketable and have lead to my current career as a web developer. In conceptualizing my studio paintings, I have attempted through painting compositions of pixels to bring the electronically based portion of my creativity full-circle back to the studio, and at some point set a goal for myself to arrive at an art form that suited both my conceptual studio art creativity with my knowledge of web technologies. Im pleased to announce that Ive landed on the beginnings of an art form that does just that. So without further ado:
I call them Twitterscapes. They are pictographical representations of Twitters timeline that use the individual alpha-numeric-symbolic characters of each tweet to create a composition of color using the users profile colors as selected. The way it works is that each tweet on the feed is matched character for character with parameters that turn it into a color. Then the color is displayed as a small rectangle (or as I like to say, a macro-pixel) on the screen. At the end of the 20 tweets that the public timeline provides, there is a 700x 800 image composed of user-assigned colors in the pattern of the users tweets: thoughts, musings, communications, or shout-outs.
Already, there are a handful of data visualization techniques for Twitter. Its been selected as a test platform for the development of data visualization tools for reasons including its uniform data set: always 140 characters, always free of garbage (spam, injections, malware, etc.) The 140 characters of twitter provide a manageable data set for which to build venn diagrams, linear graphs of popular terms (Stream graph), and others. Twitterscapes, while being developed in the same sandbox as other data visualization applications, removes all analysis of data from the data itself and provides a conceptual image by which to muse on the rhythms of the communication by strangers to strangers, the colors selected by strangers to best express their tweets, and how all of this appears in a random but uniform grouping - a sample of 20 of tens of thousands of tweets per second.
Twitterscapes innate properties are that they are fleeting. They exist, in potential for 60 seconds and then that potential is gone forever. Being pulled into the browser, they exist until the page is refreshed, or else captured as an image and preserved as such in the realm of digital imaging. A print of a Twitterscape is the preservation of a fleeting moment in time, removed from its digital context as visual proof of its own existence for its short time. Conceptually, prints of Twitterscapes are photographs of interpreted data . The print is not the data, nor is the live Twitterscape the data. In an age of images, these pictographs tell the story of select twitter users in the tune of old photographs. How many details stay in memory? How many details matter to recall the feeling told by the image? What did these tweets actually say? Surely they have lost most meaning even in their native format simply by being removed from their original contexts and exposed to the world as public data.
Im anxious to see what Twitterscapes evolve into, as more than the Public Timeline are incorporated. Individual Twitterscape feeds are a near-future possibility, as well as mega-transforming trending topics twitterscapes. They already extend my current body of painted work: my pixellations (paintings of pixels) as I have already essentially chosen those latex colors as mine - and now Im painting with other users colors using what they offer to the public as data. There are other data sets out there too - but Twitter might be enough, until the concept has fully matured and undergone the tests of criticism and time.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by carolinecblaker: Excited to introduce Twitterscapes - my new creation bringing art and data together through images. http://ow.ly/19upn
Here is an interesting way to turn Twitter into an art form:
This is a painting by artist and web developer Caroline C. Baker who takes the actual view of pixels from Twitter information and paints ...
Twitterscapes innate properties are that they are fleeting. They exist, in potential for 60 seconds and then that potential is gone forever. Being pulled into the browser, they exist until the page is refreshed, or else captured as an image and preserved as such in the realm of digital imaging. A print of a Twitterscape is the preservation of a fleeting moment in time, removed from its digital context as visual proof of its own existence for its short time. Conceptually, prints of Twitterscapes are photographs of interpreted data . The print is not the data, nor is the live Twitterscape the data. In an age of images, these pictographs tell the story of select twitter users in the tune of old photographs. How many details stay in memory? How many details matter to recall the feeling told by the image? What did these tweets actually say? Surely they have lost most meaning even in their native format simply by being removed from their original contexts and exposed to the world as public data.
Im anxious to see what Twitterscapes evolve into, as more than the Public Timeline are incorporated. Individual Twitterscape feeds are a near-future possibility, as well as mega-transforming trending topics twitterscapes. They already extend my current body of painted work: my pixellations (paintings of pixels) as I have already essentially chosen those latex colors as mine - and now Im painting with other users colors using what they offer to the public as data. There are other data sets out there too - but Twitter might be enough, until the concept has fully matured and undergone the tests of criticism and time.