Jonathan Harris

Jonathan Harris gave us a brief presentation at ITP about his latest works. He means a lot to me in terms of introducing me to the world of parsing and visualizing data. I still remember his 10by10 that he did back in 2004. Here are some notes that I took from the presentation:

I consider myself a storyteller, people have a lot in common in the world. seeing the gaps between the people, language gap, ethnic gaps, sexually gaps, educational gaps. we use those gaps to make communities. make paintings, take photos are things that we do express, to find things in common. self-expression leaves foot steps with the new web technologies.

passive observation. it doesn’t directly ask people questions. people don’t know they are watched. you don’t have the interview’s paradox. anthropologists dilemma with talking to natives. surveillance. youcan use survelliance to find beauty. we feel fine. ancient greek stories from skies. constellations. what would it be like if we draw constellations on the sky today? page metaphors doesn’t work anymore, storytelling becomes more important. graph and nodes and representation of those nodes in different shapes. find a manner of presentation that suits into the content of the presentation. we feel fine, human qualities. helps connect the presentation.universe, it is more literal, question start with the question. how you can answer that question with getting data. he does the sketching on paper, never used computer for experimentation. use it as a tool. am I interested in building a tool? yes I am but it’s hard to build a tool that gives insight. he tries to stay away calling it science. storytelling, there is no synthesizers that bring blogs etc.