the dumpster

14 February 2006

an aesthetic portrait of romantic breakups from a group of 20,000 blog posts describing breakups in 2005. this 'social data browser' visualises inferred reasons for the break-up, who was involved, age & gender of the author, & emotional state, with similar breakups showing up with similar colours. launched today, Valentine's Day. [tate.org.uk & tate.org.uk]

aesthetic & blog & infovis . comments (5)

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comments

can anyone get this to anything other than show random fragments from blogs referring to breakups? where are the relationships between different people? does clicking on the sidebars do anything? it looks pretty, but there doesn't seem to be any structure, just a random bunch of "breakup" posts. what am i missing?

andrew cooke . 14 February 2006

like Manovich's essay on The Dumpster says, I think the piece is more about understanding the overall social dynamics of breakups in an online environment (more breakups at the end of the year, for instance). it's exploratory art.

andrea . 15 February 2006

Hi gang, Golan here (one of the artists of the Dumpster project).

In the rush to launch the project on Valentine's day, some aspects of the interface weren't completely finished :) The sidebars are active; for example, the left-hand sidebar displays the similarity (via brightness) of all breakups to the currently selected one. Similarity being a weighted metric from a large number of analyzed properties.
I'm still uploading large improvements to the interface, and it's the 19th. If you're interested in the piece, please re-visit it in a couple of days... please!
Yours sincerely,
Golan

Golan Levin . 20 February 2006

aha! thanks - now it makes more sense!

andrew cooke . 25 February 2006

Hi. Golan,

How would you explain a interpretation of Dumpseter based on a semiotic analysis that accounts for an art that computes on large numbers?

Jason . 8 April 2006

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