I Want You To Want Me

Jonathan Harris loosely describes himself as a storyteller…someone who can spin a narrative out of almost any data, as long as there is a vast amount of it and it is personal, using the power of computer science, graphic design, visual art, anthropology, photography, storytelling, travel, interviews, and probably a few other things too.

The material that forms the basis of this work is normally fragments of other people’s lives. Together with his Stamford collaborator Sep Kamvar he uses the power of the Internet as the great listener to collect words and sentences from blog posts, photographs, news articles, etc. and finds novel and touching ways to represent them.

Fittingly exhibited last year on Valentine’s Day as part of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at MoMA in New York, I Want You To Want Me is an interactive installation, displayed on a 56” HD touch screen, which chronicles the online profiles of people from a variety of online dating sites every few hours.

The visualisation consists of an interactive sky, whose weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy, snowy, etc) can be controlled by the viewer. Through the sky float hundreds of blue and pink balloons, each representing a single dating profile, with blue for male and pink for female. The brighter balloons are younger people; the darker balloons older people. The piece has 5 formal movements, focusing on sentences that start with “I am” or “I am looking for”, on opening or closing lines, or sorting the most popular turn-ons, first dates, desires, self-descriptions and interests.

Jonathan and Sep are probably best known for similar projects entitled We Feel Fine, launched in 2007, which searches the world’s blog posts for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”, and Universe, a look at what we elevate in our consciousness via blog posts and news articles to hero status in the 21^st century, much like the way the ancient Greeks and Romans cultivated myths and legends and projected them into constellations of stars.

The way ‘We Feel Fine’ works reminds me of that game we played as kids where one person would write the first paragraph of a story, and then turn the piece of paper down on itself, to hide everything but the last sentence. Then you’d pass it to the next player, who just had that last sentence as the jumping off point for the next paragraph. The stories were always more elaborate and hilarious than anything you could have written on your own.

Key to all these projects is to be bale to straddle many disciplines and to find new ways to combine information, and this is reflected by the rapidly growing cadre of info-visualisers and interaction designers, along with people like Aaron Koblin, Manuel Lima and Catalogtree who are starting to revolutionise the way we see and process information.

This article is also available here.