Pixemo

Project Description

Pixemo is an interactive installation that draws meaning from the wild world of Twitter. The protagonists of this work are the Pixies (plural of Pixi), who exist only in the digital realm. Pixies are byte-sized, simple creatures who are sensitive to particular emotions expressed in a Tweet. These emotions include love, hate, apathy and happiness, and each Pixi is a physical representation of a tweet’s emotion. They express these emotions with their movements and interactions with other Pixies (for example, angry Pixies are exceptionally fast and bump into other Pixies). As certain emotions become more prevalent in the environment, the environment itself changes to reflect the mood of the world.

Pixies can be controlled from our world using emotive blocks with fiducial markers on the underside. Placing certain blocks onto the space will draw out different emotions from the Pixies and therefore change the visual landscape.

This work is made possible using Processing as the programming language and Reactivision technology for the touchscreen and fiducial tracking. This project was inspired by Jonathan Harris and Stephen Kamvar’s ‘We Feel Fine’ which is an online-based work allowing the interaction of human emotions from online data. Amy Hoy’s ‘twistori’ is another similar online work which draws emotional data specifically from Twitter.

Pixemo was created in partnership with Rijia Liu.

A development blog showing the development process can be found here.

My Role

My role for this project was primarily the graphic design of the project. I produced all 2D and 3D mockups of the project, as well as art for the interface and promotional material for the project. Rijia and myself worked together to develop the touch screen table.

Thanks

Thanks to my Dad, Peter Conkas, for helping me build the frame for the table.