Tweet up your life
Interactive video installation with social network platform / 2011
The platform tweetupyourlife.com – and the associated video installation of the same name, critically examine the changing forms of social interaction. Are there intercultural differences or are we developing into a communicative monoculture with Web 2.0?
Four fictitious Web 2.0 characters, portrayed by four actors, interpret over 2000 original status messages from existing social networks. The approximately 2000 collected status messages are arranged thematically and phonetically and reflect „private“ interests and opinions of these fictional profiles: nerd, hedonist, cultural pessimist and scene god. Even „private“ movies and pictures of the actors are „updated“ and changed on the profiles.
On the tweetupyourlife.com platform, the four characters are linked in a perpetual dialog, where users can follow the action „live“ from any computer and whenever they want. And he can enrich and change the course of the dialogue and the Internet-controlled video installation tweet up your life with his own films, photos or links.
A speech recognition system filters out relevant terms from the collected data and the user’s contribution. Based on these terms, the system accesses a short matching flash movie from the huge database of pre-recorded responses from the actors. This film is fed into the installation. The fictional characters appear to answer and enter into a dialogue with the visitor. Each answer in turn triggers a programmed chain reaction between the actors in the installation.
In the exhibition situation, the visitor enters the installation through four entrances, a dark space formed by four projection surfaces. In the center of this space he finds himself surrounded by the four larger-than-life projected characters. The visitor can make contact, but will never be a member of this conspiratorial community that follows its own system-driven rules.
tweet up your life reflects the absurd group behavior on the net and thus becomes a contemporary document of a current phenomenon.