Assignment 5: "What Now?" EMOTE Project

Here's some interesting Internet art that I made for my final project.

Artist Statement

This year's political season has been unlike any other. Not only is it becoming increasingly difficult to avoid politics in our everyday lives, many throughout the nation were drawn to the drama created within the latest election. This drama inspired citizens to think, to talk to others (both in agreement and disagreement), and ultimately solidify opinions about the true issues that are at stake.

With the Presidential election itself now behind us, we still have at least four years ahead that appear saturated with uncertainty. Will our new President live up to his campaign promises? Will the dreadful fears that many have expressed come to fruition? There is no doubt that the concerns and emotions did not stop on Election Day. In fact, they are now more apparent than ever.

This experimental art project, EMOTE, explores these concerns and emotions from both sides of the aisle by giving people a new public platform to engage and express themselves. The platform is a custom-built web application, a digital aggregate, from which the public's voice is recorded and translated into digital imagery. It uses chance-operation to encode text-based emotions into visuals, represented by various, prominent United States-based political figures. The project starts by asking the visitor two questions:

1. In one word, how does the current state of politics make you feel?
2. What single topic are you most passionate about that you feel politicians are ignoring?

Taking this anonymous input, the project will use Google Images to translate the answer from the first question (your current feeling about the current state of politics) into two photos of politicians (one from each major party) expressing that same emotion. Further, it will remember the answer to the second question in order to create an ever-growing list of topics that visitors are concerned about.

From there, a separate 'Watch' page allows visitors to explore the randomized results of these human-based inputs. By visiting the Watch page, the visitor is presented with, in 5-second intervals, one of the growing list of topics juxtaposed with an actual emotion entered by another visitor. The emotion is then complimented with the two found photos retrieved from Google Images of politicians supposedly expressing the same emotion towards the given topic.

The more users that visit and engage with the site, the more random and unpredictable the Watch page will become. In this sense, the project will remain alive and dynamic for years to come. By handing over the keys of what will be shown on this site to the visitor, there is no telling what may come up.

The project is now live and open to the public. The domain and hosting have been paid out for at least a year (through December 13, 2017). You are encouraged to participate. Make your voice heard, engage today:

Quick Facts

• Project Start Date: November 13, 2016
• Project End Date: November 13, 2017
• Random Politicians: 22 (11 Republicans, 11 Democrats)
• Chance-Operations:
  • When a user enters an emotion, two politicians are selected at random from the database (1 Republican, 1 Democrat) to be used in two different Google Image searches
  • For each Google Image search, the top 3 results are fetched. These results change daily, as Google adjusts its search algorithm and as new photos become popular
  • The project will then randomly select 1 of the 3 top images supplied by Google to represent that emotion from that politician
  • When a visitor visits the Watch page, a user-entered topic is selected at random every 5 seconds
  • Alongside the topic, a random user-supplied emotion is selected
  • Using the randomly selected emotion, two of the previously fetched images of politicians expressing that particular emotion is selected (once again, 1 Republican, 1 Democrat)
  • The two images are then displayed below the topic in a random order (sometimes the Republican will be on top, sometimes the Democrat will be on top)

Known Issues

• Sometimes images do not exist of the randomly selected politician showing a certain emotion. The 22 politicians that the project uses were selected specifically because they were/are some of the most photographed politicians of all time, increasing their chance of being captured expressing nearly all emotions
• The images retrieved from Google Images can be found on any of over a billion websites around the Internet. Some of these websites may not allow their images to be shown on websites other than their own. As a result, some images may appear 'broken'
• As smart as Google is sometimes, it can also be pretty dumb. Some emotions can not easily be translated by a computer into a found photo, but Google will try nonetheless. This adds to the further randomness of the images that may come up on the Watch page, and can make the results even more interesting

Related Art/Inspirations

• John Baldessari's "Prima Facie: Unpleasant/Disgusted" (2005)
  • "It seemed to me that a word could be an image or an image could be a word. They could be interchangeable." - J. Baldessari
  • The same concepts apply to the text version of the emotion versus the two randomly selected photos based on Google's interpretation of that emotion
• ART 345's "Windows of Catharsis" (2016)
  • I liked the idea of opening the project up for others to participate and contribute to. While I had an initial vision going in on how I wanted this project to work, it now has the chance to take on a life of its own and head in a completely different direction

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