I am a huge supporter of the creation of new digital forms of artistic expression that have traditional Art (with a captial “A”) roots.
[See Authored Spaces: Old North Church]
My friend and colleague Russell Goldenberg, an accomplished interactive designer and digital artist in his own right, has been melding social media and communal interactions with captivating visualizations for years.
Twitter is the ideal vessel for hot-off-the-press complaints. Stuck in traffic? Blast it out to your friends. Hate the last 10 years of MTV programming? Let the rafters ring with your disdain. Goldenberg’s Twitterfuck 2010, is a distilled snapshot of online disappointment, humor and hatred in a sequence of 140 character tirades.
Twitterfuck from russell goldenberg on Vimeo.
Today I came across the work of Ivan Sharko, more specifically The Boring Gallery, a interactive installation and online gallery.
According to FastCoDesign: “Sharko developed an app that let folks “paint” portraits of the ennui of the Twitterati. Over the course of four days in May, the app scanned Twitter for stuff people were bitching about and connected these subjects to photos on Flickr, by using the same tag and geo location. Then, the public used a touch screen table, rigged with a drawing engine, to give bored tweets abstract, visual form. As Sharko writes in an email:
The artwork became a collaboration between the real users who physically interacted with the application and Twitter & Flickr participants. Physical interactions defined the composition of the artwork and some aspects of its look, while Twitter & Flickr users directly affected the rules that guided the engine’s colors, shapes, sizes and behaviors.”
The Boring Gallery from ivanS on Vimeo.
I appreciate how both Goldenberg and Sharko attempt to make meaning and blaze paths through the vast expanse of information produced by Twitter daily. The real art is in the connections the user makes with the content provided to them by the artist.
Please feel free to check out more from Sharko’s Boring Gallery and the work of Russell Goldenberg.
Some information provided by FastCoDesign
