Palazzo Strozzi
  Bill Viola, Christian Nold, Yves Netzhammer
Teresa Margolles, Valerio Magrelli, William Kentridge
Katharina Grosse, Andrea Ferrara, Elisa Biagini
Maurice Benayoun, Antonella Anedda
 
   
  MAURICE BENAYOUN, JEAN-BAPTISTE BARRIÈRE
 
 
 
   
  The Mechanics of Emotions : e-Spotting 9/11
The Net as been often compared to the world’ nervous system. Checking the news on the Web becomes a way to get a real time image of the world state of mind. The Mechanics of Emotions is a series of works using data from the web to build dynamic maps of the world’s emotions.

e-Spotting(Emotion Spotting) is a music/internet performance, and now, for the exhibiton at the Palazzo Strozzi an art installation in which the map of world's emotions is turned into music scores.

The World Emotionnal Mapping
The maps of the emotions are extracted in real time from the Net. The maps are made of words, whose size correlates with the number of hits related to emotions for the 3200 biggest cities around the world.

Mixing by watching
In the installation, using VR binoculars, the visitor visually explores the maps from inside the globe, selecting the zones of the world to reveal their emotional state of mind. By observing the world, watching becomes a way to mix feelings and to extract the euphoric, enigmatic or emotional music out of it.

The Installation
Beside the binoculars there are two screens:
One displays the map of the world where the words are distributed according to emotions spotted by the watcher.
Another screen presents the globe from the outside, increasingly covered by words and the never ending list of the emotional ranking for the 3200 cities.

e-Spotting 9/11
The maps spotted by the visitors are the maps built on September 11th 2007 scanning the news on the Net. Six years after the attact on the World Trade Center they give an interesting interpretation of how people feel this day through 11 emotions:
Mad, outraged, shocked, terrified, bad, sad, nervous, glad, excited, proud, satisfied
They are located on the map like obscure data, scrutinised as paradoxal feelings, waiting to be deciphered by compulsive e-spotters.

Music by Jean-Baptiste Barrière
Software: Brigit Lichtenegger, Sofiane Souidi

Produced by Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence CITU (Paris 1)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
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