The Public Enemy

Date
2016-07

Grant yourself the ability to throw the proverbial chair at the system! It feels good, momentarily, but in reality our systems are designed to be relief valves that maintain the status quo.

The Public Enemy was an online 3D environment (2016-2020) where the participant could throw a chair at either or both of the US political parties. Depending on which party was hit, a flood of contextually appropriate Twitter hashtags that were continuously mined from the network would rain from above. If a hashtag struck one of the party icons, the application would use natural language processing techniques to recombinantly generate and re-post a new tweet using the offending tweet. Tweets were a mashup of text from Avatar Emergency (Gregory Ulmer), The World of Wrestling (Roland Barthes), Walden: Economy (Henry David Thoreau), and a transcript from Extreme Championship Wrestling: One Night Stand 2006.

Details

Medium: Networked application utilizing node.js, Twitter API, WebGL (three.js), Bullet Physics (ammo.js), and RiTA (Version 1.12; Howe 2015) for natural language processing of Twitter data.
Dimensions: variable