Network Effect: Your Time Here is Limited

October 6, 2015

I learned that Jonathan Harris (along with Greg Hochmuth) has some new work out! It’s called Network Effect.

I read up on the project, prior to viewing it… and I think you should do the reverse. I would recommend just going in and experiencing it first, and then check back here when you’re done.

Good? Good.

There’s a lot of great details about the project in the epilogue, and makes for some fascinating reading. This gets to the heart of what the project is about:

The videos activate our voyeurism, the sound recordings tempt us with secrets, and the data promises a kind of omniscience, but all of it is a mirage — there is no one here to watch, there is no secret to find, and the data, which seems to be so important, is actually absurd. In this sense, the project mirrors the experience of browsing the web – full of tantalizing potential, but ultimately empty of life.

Digging through all the data used for this project, it’s really quite something. It’s amazing how much information is out there, and equally amazing the things that Harris and Hochmuth do with that data.

Of particular note, I found it cool that they decided to use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to crowdsource some of the harder to quantify info.