Contributing Artist - 100 McCaul Lobby
Ana Jofre
In this interactive data visualization, members of the audience will have access to a keyboard on which they can enter a search term. The script will first scrape Twitter for recent tweets containing the search term entered by the user. These tweets will be displayed onscreen in a streaming format. If the user does not enter a new term in that time, this is where it gets interesting. The script will then identify the most common term in the initial scraped tweets and will do a second twitter scrape to output all tweets that share this new second term. This process will reiterate with subsequent terms until a new term is entered into the keyboard. I am curious about where each initial search term will go conceptually as the code iterates.
The experience of this work is intended to simulate important facets of the experience of linking through articles online —sometimes one will end up in a very unrelated place after a few iterations, whereas other searches take us into more detail on our original topic. The project interrogates our intuitions about the internet’s connection to distractibility, short attention spans, roving curiosity, and even the open-minded receptivity to new information. It also speaks to the rapidity of the evolution of information.
Ana Jofre received her PhD in Physics from the University of Toronto, did Post-doctoral work at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Gaithersburg MD, and taught at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte for six years before transitioning her career towards the arts. She has recently completed her MFA at OCAD University in Toronto. Her publications and conference presentations cover a wide range of intellectual interests, from physics to cultural studies, and she has exhibited her artwork extensively. Her current creative and research interests include figurative sculpture, the uncanny, puppetry, robotics, embodiment, and data visualization. She is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at OCAD University in the visual analytics lab.
For more information or to contact the artist: http://onewomancaravan.net/index.html
