Category : ART
By Joelle Bitton（France）
Twipology is a garden generated from Twitter conversations that have used the hashtags 'whatever', 'system', 'control', 'radical', 'surface', 'cigarette', 'pink', 'raw', 'passage', 'abstract', 'kindergarten', 'superficial' for one month. The hashtags were chosen by the artist for their ambiguous meanings.
A landscape inspired by Japanese zen gardens was generated from these Twitter feeds as they invite for contemplation of details and patterns. Visitors are indeed welcome to walk, sit, rest, contemplate, spend hours or days in that space.
The Twipology project is a comment on the uses of personal data for narrated digital fabrication. It's a form of interactive fabrication where users can use fabrication machines in an intuitive manner.
http://superficiel.org/wordpress/twipology/
Twipology was created based on controlling a router with Twitter data.
I wanted to interface human-based trivial data generated in everyday life with a fabrication machine, in this case a router. The Twitter feeds are collected with a series of hashtags and they are then transformed into geometry based on the length of the Twitter status and the types of words used. A program written in Rhino/Grasshopper then generates coordinates for a landscape which is then on sent to the software MasterCam that will be read by a router for fabrication. The scale of the piece meant that large foam sheets were milled everyday for an entire week.
The structure is that of an entire room - I wanted to create a space or landscape where people could spend time, sit, sleep, converse, just like in a garden. I was inspired by the structure of Japanese gardens that have moments of pauses and contemplations and other of walking.
Seiichi Saito
Seiichi Saito
This entry “Twipology” is not like any other visualization works that we often see, but this one disregards any characteristics or meaning in all the data itself, and creates a beautiful garden from the data. I think the garden is a beautiful space to reflect and forget the passing of time. We may be able to use the insurmountable volume of data that continues to increase in recent years to create something or somewhere unprecedented by using numbers in principle but not in meaning. This piece of work sheds light on that possibility.
