Jonathan Harris is back!The internet artist "combines elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, to design systems to explore and explain the human world.”
His past projects include We Feel Fine, a database of several million human feelings aggregated from blogs, and the superb Whale Hunt, a storytelling experiment.
Harris’ latest work, called the Sputnik Observatory, is dedicated to documenting contemporary culture. The Observatory consists of interviews with hundreds of leading thinkers from all sorts of disciplines and chronicles some of the most provocative human ideas to have emerged in the last few decades.
The thing that I love about the site is the sense of exploring it gives you through forming your own connections between seemingly disconnected ideas.
As Harris puts it:
“Everything is connected to everything else, and that topics and ideas that may seem fringe and even heretical to the mainstream world are in fact being investigated by leading thinkers working in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, music… Sputnik is dedicated to bringing these crucial ideas from the fringes of thought out into the limelight, so that the world can begin to understand them.”
(The picture accompanying this post is Bill Cheswick's map of the internet, in which he traces the edges of the individual networks and then colour codes them. As Clay Shirky eloquently described it, "this thing that looks like a peacock hit a windscreen".)
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