In the fall of 2010, I created an installation and series of drawings for the Mixed Greens’ Windows program. Previous windows have presented static images addressing subject matter ranging from the transcendent to the pictorially sublime.

I wanted to do something different.

I created a dynamic poem to New York by using Processing Software and algorithmically generated content as a conceptual root, tracking the mood of the city in realtime.

The visual form is a continually evolving abstract field of colors and patterns, overlaid with selected News headlines, Twitter feeds, weather symbols, and more. The projected elements are generated in realtime, looping infinitely and never appear the same twice.

This piece used a database of 3000 positive and negative words to create a snapshot “mood” for the city. It looked at social media, news reports, live video feeds, time of day, and weather to score each moment in time and generate the sentiment for any given moment.

Using a combination of tools like After Effects and  Processing, I created large-format prints and drawings by using algorithmically generated content, scraped from online sources, and code that composed words and images together into discrete frames.

This resulted in a series of drawings output from the software driving the experience.