Wisdom Heart

I am going to try a little experiment. This blog will always be primarily dedicated to news and views related to Sophia's CHD and parenting issues associated with CHDs in general. But, I would like to occasionally post about things outside of these parameters that I think my audience might appreciate. This will be the first of this type of post. Please let me know your thoughts on this idea or if you just aren't interested just skip this post.

Let me give you some personal background on my aesthetics. I studied art in college and have a fine art degree in painting and sculpture. I didn't go to an important school and I do not really create anything of note these days. I believe the purpose of art should be to show people fresh ways to see their world and in turn expand their view of the world. For the most part, I have been completely disillusioned with contemporary art. Particularly, I am bothered with the degree to which self-referentiality and strangeness is encouraged by the fine art establishment. It seems galleries are always looking for that "unique" voice. There is a presumption that the best way to communicate the human condition is by focusing on its fringes rather than the things common to all of human experience. Instead of communicating the depth of experience common to all of us, it becomes like an inside joke fostering higher and higher degrees of elitism. Let me be clear, I am not saying art should be this bland conservative thing lacking expression and doing little to offend or shock its audience. What I am saying instead is this. There are shocking aspects of our world and experience which are common to all of us. In my opinion, art should reference the things the viewer is unaware of in her/his self and the world it inhabits. Instead most contemporary art highlights a sort of idiosyncratic pretense. Because this is a false expression of the artist's experience, it can serve no purpose to the viewer other than alienation or sideshow curiosity.

And though I think, blogging can be quite self-referential and might even promote some degree of voyeurism. It seems less prone to the elitist tendencies of the art world. The blogosphere is a diversity of individual voices coming together in a sort of virtual public square without an editing elite to restrict whether or not a particular voice gets an audience. A direct exchange of ideas is encouraged as opposed to a disconnected presentation by a set of elite arbiters.

What if someone could create a graphical interface which could bring many of these voices together in one place to share their feelings? What if by doing so they could create an expression of the blogosphere's mood at any given time?



Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar have developed a couple of websites that use a form of data mining to scour through the text of blogs like this one. I know what you are thinking. But, in my opinion this is art and not espionage. It should be noted that the data they collect is never sold. This whole project is done for its artistic merit and has no economic agenda.
The data gathered is used to create a visual representation of the blogging community's feelings at any given time based on the voices of the individuals in the group. They search for specific terms like "I feel" or "I am feeling" and then collect that sentence along with the time, geography, and weather where the comment was recorded. They then represent each sentence as a colored shape whose size, shape and color is indicative of the sentence recorded. The concept is fairly intricate but the result is a really beautiful expression of how a community feels without overshadowing the individual voices that make up the community.

I highly recommend you spend some time exploring their creation at We Feel Fine and see how the internet is feeling.

The other site they have created is called Lovelines. It is an exploration of desires using a spectrum from love to hate. It is interesting. But I feel it lacks the beauty and grace of we feel fine.
Please let me know what you think of their project by commenting here. In my opinion, this is what art is all about.