Ellsworth Kelly Hacked My Twitter
by Brian Piana (2009)
Launch Project
Ellsworth Kelly Hacked My Twitter is a real-time data visualization of Twitter postings retrieved from a set of people that Piana is tracking on Twitter, a social networking technology that uses mobile phones to update subscribers. The composition is structured as a flexible grid that can be altered by changing the size of your browser window. Each colored square in the piece represents an individual tweet that has been sent through Piana’s feed. The top-left hand corner square represents the most recent post. The actual messages that are being sent in each tweet are not available. Instead, a color code appears and information about the author, time, and date of the post can be viewed by rolling over that color. Like Ellsworth Kelly’s painting Colors for a Large Wall (1951), several multi-colored squares are arranged in an arbitrary sequence. Unlike Kelly’s piece, Ellsworth Kelly Hacked My Twitter is a representation of an invisible information network—a real-time ordering of a system that is without visible form.
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