Library :: We Feel Fine

I admit that I am not the best judge of human character. I can’t judge a mood and I inevitably gaffe. I don’t understand people.

But I have found something that does. We Feel Fine gives a running update of the mood of the Internet. It is billed as an exploration of human emotion, in six movements. It’s by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar >> Harris is an artist perhaps best known for the wonderful www.tenbyten.org >> whilst Kamvar is head of personalization at Google.

We Feel Fine is an artwork that expresses the finest nuances of the emotional spectrum and then gives us the tools to explore, experience and analyse them. WFF is an elegant demonstration of the power of data visualization as well as a truly collaborative and mesmerizing artwork.

We Feel Fine harvests expressions of feelings from the world's newly posted blog entries. It finds and stores occurrences including 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 can be selected aand arranged according to a wide variety of criteria.

I can ask it anything. About how people are feeling, anyway. And obviously the insight that I will gain into the emotional zeitgeist will assist in my campaign for total world domination... I mean, providing a better MoD experience.



I Feel Fine is beautiful and intuitive and playful. Six different movments correspond to six interface models, allowing the captured information to be viewed in different ways; particle clouds are popped to release captured sentences, ‘murmurs’ scrolls through them, 'montage' presents images associated with the captured sentences as above, ‘mounds’ is a disarmingly blobby bar graph.

We Feel Fine >>