Maurice Benayoun: 4 Emotions, 8 Winds
Artist(s):
Collaborators:
Title:
- 4 Emotions, 8 Winds
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 2014
Medium:
- Video, Internet Data
Category:
Artist Statement:
The emotions of the world move and spread around the planet according to real-time winds, creating chance arabesques on the world map, forming meandered natural movements similar to the brushstrokes of Chinese calligraphy and ink drawing. Created through the automatic analysis of Internet data representing the emotions of 3200 of the world’s largest cities, the work understands the Internet as a de facto ‘World Nervous System’, or the harbinger of the planet’s emotional sensitivities.
The last avatar of the Mechanics of Emotions series of artworks, Emotion Winds expands the running theme of this far-reaching oeuvre, namely the relationship between ‘big data’ and what MoBen describes as ‘the human factor’ – that makes something tangibly human. The works in the series utilize techniques from economics to measure human sensitivities or feelings, looking at ways in which conventional forms of the quantification of Big Data can give credence to systems detached from, or playing with, the very tenor of human emotions. In other works in the Mechanics of Emotions series, stock market data has been directly compared to information related to real human affects. In Emotion Winds, these same human emotions are overlaid and combined with graphic representations of natural phenomena such as global wind cycles, and a poetic visualization finally emerges of Internet emotion streams from different cities across the world.
藉由自動分析代表全球3200座主要城市的網路資料，以呈現全世界的情緒即時流動，如同風向般地在世界地圖上隨機劃出阿拉伯式花紋、或中國水墨般的自然蜿蜒線條。作品所認知的網際網路，是實質意義的世界神經系統，抑或是全球情緒感知的風向球。
作為＜情緒的機制＞系列的最後代表，它將此廣大的主題體系擴展至巨量資料(big data)與作者稱呼為構成人類實質的「人性因素」兩者的關係中。此系列作品使用經濟學技術以量測人類感知與心情，尋找傳統資料量化可以支持人類情感根源中抽離的系統，或是進一步操弄之。這系列的其他作品中，有的則是將真實人類情感與股市資料與比較，而在此則是以自然界的物質流動現象，如全球風向循環，視覺化同一份情感資料並結合疊加，詩意地呈現出世界各地城市的情感網絡。
