The emoto data sculp­ture repres­ents message volumes, aggreg­ated per hour and senti­ment level in hori­zontal bands which move up and down according to the current number of Tweets at each time. This resulted in simpli­fied 3-dimensional surfaces which allows visitors to identify patterns in message frequency distri­bu­tion more easily. And while not being specific­ally designed in this direc­tion, the surfaces also nicely support haptic exploration.

The Sentigraph is a 9.50 meter long multi-layered print, designed for the visitor to explore the overall timeline of the Olympics. Th graph shows the average mood for all events and topics as tracked by emoto. It was printed on trans­parent acrylic glass and offset from the wall by approx. 7cm to reveal the content behind it. All messages were directly attached to the wall and have been selected for peaks in the graph based on the occur­rences if the Tweet text.

First Draft Milling / Tweet Landscape In ‘Chemiwood’

Draft Milling / ‘Chemiwood’ & MDF

Heatmap Image (Excerpt) Exported From Tableau

Workflow In Grasshopper / From Image To Manufacturing

Material Close-Up

Material Close-Up With White Projection

Material Close-Up With Projected Cursor

Custom Projection Mapping Software

Projection Mapping

From the emoto archive, we have aggreg­ated frequen­cies of messages per hour and senti­ment level into 2-dimensional heat maps. These heat maps were then trans­formed into 3D geometry and finally CNC-milled in collab­or­a­tion with our manu­fac­turer Tischlerei Bächer using Polyurethane-foam (’Chemiwood’). Additionally, the objects were painted using a dual component paint with particles to optimise the surface for projection.

On top of this sculp­ture we have then projected multiple heat maps, only displaying events for the currently selected theme (i.e. Team GB). A visitor could control which theme to show using a Griffin Powermate. Pressing the button would cycle through the themes. Rotating it would move the cursor along the timeline, showing most retweeted messages for each hour and theme.

The projec­tion mapping was custom developed in Processing as part of the install­a­tion soft­ware. The 2D heat-maps were gener­ated in Tableau and used as textures for the mapped virtual geometry. The final outcome for these textures was designed in multiple quick iter­a­tions exploring the use of many geometric shapes for the heat maps. The colours have been chosen based on the overall emoto colour scheme but were optim­ised for projec­tion onto dark grey material.

We have also decided to expand the emoto senti­ment scales from +-6 to +-12 levels, since working with phys­ical material on a 3m long table and object allowed us to display the inform­a­tion we have more granularly.

The displayed Tweets were determ­ined in a Map/Reduce work­flow using the emoto MongoDB archive. This enabled us to work more flex­ibly with the 50GBs of data. The final prin­ciple counts occur­rences of Tweet texts for each hour and selects the most occur­ring Tweet for display. While this mech­anic provided very nice results, it could be further improved to by addi­tion­ally limiting the aggreg­a­tion to one senti­ment level at a time and including edit distance in the text compar­ison process.

Created by Moritz Stefaner, Drew Hemment, Studio NAND.

A FutureEverything project for the Cultural Olympiad programme and London 2012 Festival.
Funded by Arts Council England and WE PLAY/Legacy Trust UK.

Infrastructure design & devel­op­ment by Gerrit Kaiser.

Citizen journ­alism by Andy Miah
Evaluation and blog­ging by Ege Sezen.
Project manage­ment by Leon Seth and Nick Lawrenson.
Communications by Jo Williams, Anita Morris Associates.

Emoto is produced by FutureEverything and Studio NAND.

Sentiment Analysis Partner: Lexalytics
Manufacturing Partner: Tischlerei Bächer