The Work of Jonathan Harris
Work . Biography . News . Marginalia
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Sputnik Observatory . 2009
The Sputnik Observatory is a collaboration with New York based Sputnik, Inc., an organization that documents contemporary culture through intimate video interviews with hundreds of leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology, covering a wide range of topics.
The central premise of the Sputnik project is that everything is connected to everything else, and that topics and ideas that may seem fringe and even heretical to the mainstream world are in fact being investigated by leading thinkers working in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, biology, economics, architecture, digital art, video games, computer science and music. Sputnik is dedicated to bringing these crucial ideas from the fringes of thought out into the limelight, so that the world can begin to understand them.
Conducted over more than ten years and previously unavailable to the public, the interviews within the site chronicle some of the most provocative human ideas to have emerged in the last few decades. The site itself aims to highlight the interconnections between seemingly disparate thinkers and ideas, using a simple navigational system with no dead ends, where every thought leads to another thought, akin to swimming the stream of consciousness.
I Want You To Want Me . 2008
I Want You To Want Me is an interactive installation about online dating, commissioned by and installed at New York's MoMA on Valentine's Day 2008, as part of their Design and the Elastic Mind show.
Displayed on a 56” touch screen monitor, the piece portrays an interactive sky filled with hundreds of pink (female) and blue (male) balloons, each representing a real person’s online dating profile collected from any one of several dozen Internet dating websites. Viewers can touch individual balloons to reveal personal information about the dater inside, and can rearrange the balloons in various ways to highlight different aspects of the world of online dating, including the top turn-ons, the most popular first dates, and the top desires. It is a collaboration with Sep Kamvar.
iwantyoutowantme.org | Video | Statement
Polaroid Project . 2008
In Polaroid Project, I had two hours to take 150 Polaroid exposures of a live audience, and then assemble these photographs into a grid that told some kind of story.
Starting in opposite corners are uncut pictures of a fully clothed man (bottom left / tinted blue) and a fully clothed woman (top right / tinted pink). Both genders twist towards the center along curved paths, discarding clothes, wigs, shoes, and other accessories along the way, as the photos start to shatter, becoming less about objects and more about flesh. Approaching the center, the pictures are increasingly difficult to decipher, as body parts blend together and their owners’ identities dissolve. Throughout the piece, the male and female cut marks are symmetric, mirrored copies of each other, extending beyond the boundaries of the photographs into the white border, itself composed of the individual white borders of all 150 Polaroids, so that the whole canvas comes to resemble a single giant exposure. This project was assisted by Kyla Fullenwider.
polaroidproject.org | Statement | Photos
The Whale Hunt . 2007
The Whale Hunt is a storytelling experiment.
In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States. I documented their traditional whale hunt with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, taken at five-minute intervals for seven days, and at even higher frequencies in moments of high adrenaline. This established a constant “photographic heartbeat” that more or less matched the changing pace of my own heartbeat, and which recorded every moment of the hunt. I then developed a framework for experiencing this story, allowing the viewer to rearrange the photographic elements of the story to extract multiple sub-stories focused around different people, places, topics, and other variables.
thewhalehunt.org | Statement | Highlights
Universe . 2007
Universe attempts to create new constellations for today’s night sky by continually analyzing the contents of over 20,000 international news sources, suggesting a modern mythology based on global media coverage.
'Universe' portrays all information as being interconnected. Any word, quote, person, photo, topic or story can become the “center of the universe”, causing all other items to rearrange themselves in relation to the selected item. This treatment of information is reminiscent of the way we, as humans, experience reality — each of us from our own individual perspective. 'Universe' gives data this same privilege. It was commissioned by Daylife.
universe.daylife.com | Statement
We Feel Fine . 2006
We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion.
It continually harvests sentences containing the phrase “I feel” or “I am feeling” from the Internet’s newly posted blog entries, saves them in a database, and displays them in an interactive Java applet, which runs in a web browser. Each dot represents a single person’s feeling. The color of each dot corresponds to the type of feeling it represents (bright dots are happy, dark dots are sad), and the diameter of each dot indicates the length of the sentence inside. Demographic information (age, gender, location, and weather) is also collected and displayed. Photo montages with text / image overlays are automatically constructed from photographs and feeling sentences that occur in the same blog entry. ‘We Feel Fine’ collects around 15,000 new feelings per day, and has saved over 13 million feelings since 2005, forming a constantly evolving portrait of human emotion. It is a collaboration with Sep Kamvar.
Time Capsule . 2006
Time Capsule (commissoned by Yahoo!) was designed to take a fingerprint of the human world in 2006.
Structured around ten universal themes (Love, Sorrow, Anger, Faith, Beauty, Fun, Past, Hope, Now and You) each bearing an open-ended question (“What do you love? What makes you sad? What makes you angry? What do you believe in? What’s beautiful, What’s fun? What do you remember? What is your wish? Describe your world. Who are you?”), people could respond to these questions with words, pictures, videos, sounds, and drawings. Translated into ten languages, the Time Capsule was open online for 30 days, accepting the world’s submissions. The Time Capsule project was punctuated by a three-day event outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the contents of the Capsule were projected onto the ancient canyon walls of the Jemez Pueblo, a sacred site, for three consecutive nights, from dusk until midnight.
timecapsule.yahoo.com (now closed) | Statement | Reflections | Photos
Lovelines . 2006
Lovelines is an exploration of human desire.
It explores the emotional topography of landscape between love and hate, as experienced by countless normal humans keeping personal online journals. 'Lovelines' presents a stark white screen, bounded on the bottom by a slider running from “Love” to “Hate”, with a draggable heart that becomes scratched out to the point of illegibility as the heart approaches “Hate”. As the slider is pulled through Love, Like, Want, Indifference, Dislike, and Hate, words and pictures appear above to represent the chosen state of desire or despair. It is a collaboration with Sep Kamvar.
Phylotaxis . 2005
Phylotaxis is an expression of the space where science meets culture.
Commissioned by Seed Magazine, its structure (designed by Stefan Sagmeister), is derived from the Fibonacci Sequence and closely related to the Golden Ratio. 'Phylotaxis' presents the world’s latest science news as an interactive particle system, consisting of many small dots, each representing a single piece of science news, chosen automatically by a computer program scouring the web. The Phylotaxis is therefore beyond human control, autonomously composing its own new identity every few hours, based on what's happening in the world of science.
justcurio.us . 2005
justcurio.us is an anonymous question and answer system with one simple rule: to ask a question, you must first answer someone else's question.
Question yields answer yields question. Strangers helping strangers. The questions can be about anything the best Beatles album, your saddest moment, your biggest regret, your best childhood memory, the meaning of life, whether you should break up with your girlfriend, the best crepe place in Paris, the best cure for loneliness. Anything at all. 'justcurio.us is' entirely confidential, allowing anyone to ask and answer questions with complete anonymity. It is a collaboration with Robert Kalin.
10x10 . 2004
10x10 was born from the desire to encapsulate single moments in time.
Every hour, '10x10' automatically selects the top 100 words and pictures in the world, based on what’s happening in the news. It then presents these words and pictures in an interactive ten by ten grid, and allows navigation to past grids, so that history becomes browseable. In this way, these hourly snapshots, when stitched together, form a continuous photographic tapestry of human life.
tenbyten.org | Statement | Video (9.2mb)
WordCount . 2004
Wordcount is an interactive presentation of the 88,000 most frequently used English words, ranked and scaled in order of commonness, and arranged side by side as one very long sentence.
Each word's size reflects its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.
wordcount.org | Statement | Querycount
Understanding Vorn . 2004
Understanding Vorn is an artwork in flux.
Every five minutes it scours thousands of weblogs, searching for the four most recently posted pictures that begin with the letters 'V', 'O', 'R', 'N'. Every five minutes, 'Understanding Vorn' changes, filled with fresh words and pictures from the blogosphere. The chaotic, unpredictable nature of Understanding Vorn reflects the chaotic, unpredictable nature of Germany's VORN Magazine, which commissioned the piece. VORN Magazine invites artists to create work, and then publishes whatever they create, no matter how good, bad, or strange. VORN is a collage of imagery from a diversity of creative minds, each with its own style, and its own worldview. In the same way, 'Understanding Vorn' unites unrelated creators: blog writers publishing their pictures and thoughts. When picked by the program, these blog writers experience the artist's 5 minutes of fame, their work shown in the VORN grid. Minutes later, their work vanishes, as a new crop is chosen.
understandingvorn.org | Statement
ThreatMeter . 2004
A satirical website, representing a fictitious company called "ThreatMeter.com", desperately trying to profit from America's fear of terrorism. In collaboration with Joel Gethin Lewis and Josh Nimoy.
Information Maps . 2003
Centered at Princeton University, the International Networks Archive is a global alliance of scholars who believe that geography is becoming increasingly irrelevant. INA is developing a new way of mapping our world, based on global transactions instead of geography. I helped INA develop its experimental mapping philosophy, and the way it merges data, maps and technology.
Information Maps | Non-Geographic Mapping
Troubadour Magazine . 2001 - 2003
Founded at Princeton University to counteract post-September 11 xenophobia among Americans, and to revive politcal debate on campus, Troubadour uses literature, photography and artwork to raise awareness about world issues, illustrating the common ground shared by all races and cultures. Driven by the motto, "To Become Scholars of Each Other's Experience", the magazine uses personal travel narratives to inspire cross-cultural dialogue. Each issue of Troubadour is centered around a unifying theme, such as "Empire", "Evildoers", and "Pirates".
Commercial Work . 1999 - present
A rundown of my commercial design work from the past several years is here.