Final Project: Project Contrary

-Concept

How to analyze the conceptual space of social media; whether or not messages become divorced from the content by time, especially when it comes to politics. The project speaks poetically to the concepts of fake news, hoax culture, political branding by propogating on its own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-Problem Space

Social media feedback loop

How communication platforms like Twitter operate, how do they separate the audience from the origin and the context, are they biased?

People’s feelings and emotions around the social issues/topics

Echo chamber of social media

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-Research/Other Artists’ Projects/Precedents/Comparison

Politwoops: “Explore the Tweets They Didn’t Want You to See.” Politwoops tracks deleted tweets by public officials, including people currently in office and candidates for office.

Collective Short Story: Novelist Teju Cole created an experimental fiction project on Twitter.

TweeterSheet: is a photo project that captures Twitter users where they tweeted with what they tweeted. The aim of this project is to photograph 140 twitter users — one person for each character of a tweet.

-Ai Wei Wei: turned eight years of tweets and blog posts into a beautiful 9000-page artwork. “Twitter: It is not one that records the past, but one that forms in the present condition, with real connections to the future.”

-@horse_ebooks: Fake spambot as performance art project.

-Twistori: collectivity.

-Daniel Keller: mechanics and communication of the alt-right, cross political spectrum games

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-Audience/End User

Both political sides

Diverse

Social media users

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-Sketches/Prototypes/Technology

-Twyton: Python wrapper for the Twitter API

-Tweeter ID’s:

@realdonaldtrump => 25073877       @sensanders => 29442313

@vp => 818910970567344128

@hillaryclinton => 1339835893

@potus => 822215679726100480

@potus44 => 1536791610

@barackobama => 813286

@michelleobama => 409486555

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-User Interviews/Experience/Feedback

First User Interviews (22 people):

-Is people I talked to represented a diverse audience?

-Can people understand the interface and does the physical aspects work?

-Was the data sufficent for the aspect I am testing—trends (Early stage research)

-Is it potentially interesting and work well? Early stage of ideation?

Second User Interviews:

-Physical look

-Interaction

Expert Interviews:

Martin Roth: Artist. Lights and plants: linked grow lights to the tweets of policy and opinion makers. The more retweets these people and organizations gain, the stronger the lights that nurture the plants. Aim: to create growth. “When you are in the space the instability of the light / the flickering makes you aware of an instability outside.”

Deva Woodly: Assistant Professor, Politics. Had difficulty running through mental imaginations what could my project generate.

-How to interact with non-designers/Challenge: Supply her some example tweets-not just verbal descriptions? How input and interaction effects outcome and experience? How system functions?

Evan Roth:

-Only removing the content from the name. Context stream and removing the celebrity structure from it. But there is a political baggage attached to it.

-Nature of the medium, digital: how to present it? why take it outside when the Internet is the medium itself? Aim: it is so hard to reach to you in a non-biased way so I am leaving this bubble to reach you—statement

-Interjection of the conversation to the other spheres, “retweets”,”follows”

-Other social media platforms/implementation? Twitter and Trump—highly branded things already.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-Final Product (physical or digital)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-Future Expansion

-Testing with other platforms

-Meaningful tweets, spliting according to the words? tags?

-Reaching out to more people

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