Learning Cycle 03

For this learning cycle, I needed to define new dataset for my visualisation work, which is going to be my major project and find some evidence, knowledge and theories that can support the notion of my project and fundamental structure of interactive artwork. My project title is “We are Happier than Me”. As I have already considered, my major project is going to be visualisation networks, it is going to explore people’s way of talking and expressing themselves in cyber space.

Conceptualisation – Collective Intelligence
I needed to find appropriate knowledge or theories that can support and document a notion of my visualisation project. So I read and scanned a lot of books, articles and net-art project reviews.

First of all, I was reminded that in 2008, there was the biggest protest in South Korea. Tens of thousands of South Koreans were demonstrating on the streets of the capital to protest against the government’s decision to import what they say was unsafe American beef.

This is remembered as typical example of collective intelligence
From this instance, people could show the power of collective opinions, and also they realized a visible effect of the collectivity, which became exemplary model of demonstration culture.

----------------------------------------


What is Collective Intelligence?
- Collective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals.
- Collective intelligence appears in a wide variety of forms of consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans, and computer networks.
Collective intelligence is the capacity of human communities to evolve towards higher order complexity and harmony.

Collective Intelligence of Pierre Levy
Levy, in his book "World Philosophy" (2000), human race has been made group intelligence with communicating to intellectual abilities and assets using the technology of printing, communications and transportation, the collective intelligence can achieve that integration of human race through communication in cyber space.



Basically, the theory of collective intelligence in cyber space could be a fundamental notion for movement of visual works, and the project also could be a visual demonstration of this theory as the way of interaction in net-art.

Emoticons in Social Networks
I found a simple and interesting result when I was researching online cultures. According to SearchTwitter.com, they looked at about four million Twitter status updated messages (tweets) collected from the public time line over a seven-day period running from 27th April to 3rd May 2008. The research was about what people say when they tweet.
Two kinds of results came up from this research. First of all, there is a list of the top five words people send.
1. Test 2. lol 3. Working 4. : ) 5. Sleeping
The other result is that there were three main types of conversations.
1. Everyday occurrence 2. Short term issue 3. Long term issue
From this research, I became interested in two words of the first result – “lol”, “: )” - and first type of conversation in the second result – “Everyday occurrence”.
Therefore, I could get a proposition from this, which is that people express their feeling naturally in the sentences as emoticons rather than using a phrase for that.
So, I decided to use emoticons to explore people’s expression of instant emotion on the Internet. The emoticon is a textual expression representing the face of a writer’s mood or facial expression.




Emoticon in Cyber Space?
Another way of sharing a writer’s feeling regardless different languages, locations and origins.



The Project, We are Happier than Me ;
An emoticon can be individual unit to explore people’s expression of instant feeling.
And that could be fundamental material for visual demonstrating the influence of collective intelligence



the project consist of two parts of visualisation, which are part of statistic and asthetic.


Statistic - a number of dot represent how many people are using emoticons

More dots make bigger group!
The dots in small group can be dispersed easily because a power of pulling each other is not strong. The big group is getting bigger and sturdier mob. Even though the mob is dispersed by extrinsic pressure the dots will re-start gathering


Asthetic - collected data can make beautiful digital flower which has different shapes and colours depending on a mount of data.

More dots make more beautiful flower!
The digital flower has different shapes, sizes, colours and complexities these differences are created by how many people are smiling or not.
For being beautiful flower, it needs sunshine, water and soil. In this project, These conditions for the digital flower could be people’s participation of expression.