As perhaps best evidenced by Kanye West, Twitter can be a mess of emotions. Now there’s an art project inspired and influenced by this range of feelings.
Fuse Studio’s ‘Amygdala’ is on display in Bologna, Italy, and is comprised of two main installations. The first is a set of 41 LED columns that look something like water fountains made of light (125, 952 lights, in fact).
It displays the process of live process of analyzing and recognizing emotions. During busier periods of Twitter activity, the columns brighten up accordingly.
That data is then fed to 12 video screens every 10 minutes, which display “global emotional state” on Twitter over time. The emotions are represented as colors arranged in a circular pattern and feature accompanying sounds that mimic the emotion.
In all, the installation processes 30 tweets per second and then analyzes their overall sentiment, categorizing them into happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, fear – it’s practically a Pixar movie – or amazement.
There are a few rules in place to impact a tweet’s emotional score. For example, the system analyzes the text for negative words that could counter an otherwise positive-sounding post, or doubles a tweet’s scores if it’s written in all caps – it’s the Web’s version of shouting, after all.
The exhibition will run for three months, over the course of which it will have analyzed “millions of tweets.” Be sure to watch the video above and read the source link for more on the project.
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