Murmur Study from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

Murmur Study is a physicalized reading of Twitter, created by artists Christopher Baker and Márton András Juhász. (More details and photos.) The process, according to the artist’s site:

This installation consists of 30 thermal printers that continuously monitor Twitter for new messages containing variations on common emotional utterances. Messages containing hundreds of variations on words such as argh, meh, grrrr, oooo, ewww, and hmph, are printed as an endless waterfall of text accumulating in tangled piles below.

I’m not quite sure I understand the reason to single out tweets that match those particular text patterns—how is this format more appropriate for illustrating the mass of “emotional” tweets? (as opposed to tweets about kittens, tweet spam, tweets from political figures, tweets about thermal printers, etc.) Stunning in its scale, nevertheless.

See also: bitfall and Simanowski’s keynote from e-poetry 2009 (not linked, because I can’t find a link).

(via rhizome.org)