I am Poet

After looking at one of my mate’s poetry blogs, I’ve felt compelled to scribe one of my own.

It's entitled Somebody brought in a load of pastries and now I'm going to have to eat them all because I am a sow.

Oh donut, perched in powdered prowess,

Hovering wistfully near my desk.

Must I eat you, think I might

It's a big ad, it's a big, big, big ad

Digital Goodies

Recently I have been inspired to start working on my own digital project. In a collaboration with a couple of super talented people, we intend of exploring ideas surrounding Diaspora within the digital space. Because of this we're been looking at some great work that's being undertaken at the moment.

The first project is by Jonathon Harris entitled We Feel Fine. The site has been up for about 2 years now, but if you haven't explored in a while or ever, it's well worth spending some time with. We Feel Fine takes tweets, posts, updates from social media channels and groups them by emotion. What's particularly interesting about this project is how it taps into the guilty human pleasure of voyeurism. Peeking into someone's life on an emotional level such as this, or on a surface level such as looking through someone's facebook photo's is, as much as we mightn't like to admit it, one of the attractions of social media.

Another wonderful digital artist is Golan Levin, who for the past 15 years has explores the links between nonverbal communication and interaction play in a series of works that are innovative and encourage engagement.

The second project by two artists Theo Watson and Kyle McDonaldand captures positive human emotions to the Internet. Happy Things is an opensource program that uses the webcam on your computer to analyze your face when you're browsing and posts your screenshot every time it detects you smiling, along with the web page that you found amusing.

This project is more about measuring the personal emotion of happiness rather than the collective emotions of We feel Fine. What it gives you is something akin to personal online happiness analytics: a way of understanding what it is about the Internet that makes you happy.

It's impossible to look at this without smiling. Go on try it, I defy you.

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

Images and info curiosity of Collectively More Creative and Welcome to Optimism, the WK blog.