We Feel Fine
看到We Feel Fine的时候，就像昨天看到Muxicall，我被迷住并且投入，尽管我还不知道她是谁。
这就是we feel fine的小小一角。一个同样生活在这个星球上的人写道，Ta觉得Ta不像Ta爱Ta那样爱Ta。Ta现在觉得小小的悲伤。这段话下面时聚时散的颜色，像飘在夜空中的颜色，每一颗都代表着一个人的心情，在这个世界的某个角落。
这就是we feel fine，一个记录人们心情的艺术品。从2005年8月开始，WFF开始从博客当中收集心情。每隔几分钟，这个系统就会搜寻那些以“I feel”/“I’m feeling”开头的博客文章，并把它们收藏起来，分析这是一种什么样的感情，在哪一天，在哪个地方，藏在一个男人还是女人的心里，Ta是大人还是孩子，这一天是阴翳还是晴朗。
WFF的数据库里已经储存了几百万人的各样心情，每天这些心情以15000——20000的速度增长。我们可以搜索这些心情，甚至可以了解，在某一天，是欧洲人更快乐一点，还是亚洲人更快乐一点，是男人更快乐一点，还是女人更快乐一点。
这就是we feel fine，一件由好多好多人共同创造的艺术品。我们在长大，她也在长大，一起看美丽和悲伤，潮起潮落。
We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.
The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.
At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.
- Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar
May 2006
