Lovelines
Lovelines – 2006
Lovelines is an exploration of human desire.
Through large scale blog analysis, Lovelines illuminates the topography of the emotional landscape between love and hate, as experienced by countless normal humans keeping personal online journals.
Using a data collection engine created by the artists for their recent collaboration, We Feel Fine, Lovelines examines thousands of blogs every few minutes to find expressions of love and hate, posted by all manner of people. When it can, Lovelines identifies and saves the age, gender, and geographical location of the person who wrote the post, and then presents that information along with the post. The entries range from frivolous to profound, offering a glimpse into the hearts and minds of people blogging about their wants and needs.
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.
Lovelines is structured around three movements: “Words”, “Pictures”, and “Superlatives”. Words and Pictures iteratively present individual examples of human desire, while Superlatives provides a daily zeitgeist of the most loved, wanted, liked, and hated things. Interactive timelines represent the changing magnitude of love and hate over time, and allow navigation into the past.
The artists were invited to make this piece by Oral Fixation Mints, a breath mint company devoted to “making everyday objects beautiful”, of which Jonathan Harris is a co-founder. We realize that the heart of all fixations is the desire to own, possess, and consume. Great desires imitate the physics of giant pendulums: the higher they rise, the deeper they fall. In this sense, love is inextricably tied to hate, desire to despair. Lovelines walks the line between these two extremes, painting pictures of the shifting landscape of desire.
Constructed entirely from found artifacts – words and pictures posted to blogs – Lovelines draws its identity from a world of strangers, brought together by shared degrees of desire.
Lovelines is a collaboration with Sepandar Kamvar, and was launched simultaneously with We Feel Fine on May 8, 2006.
Jennifer said,
November 6, 2006 at 12:17 am
Hello it’s Jen again, I was wondering if you came up with any ideas on what you were going to do with your website, are you thinking of creating a site like justcurio.us or love-liness? Did you say you were part of the think tank at fabrica? And if so what was your experience like? I was also curious what you thought about ‘internet art’ in general and if you feel the information really concludes anything. Well I am off to make dinner so I will leave you with something to think about: A meme is a self-propagating idea that spreads through information networks, virally infecting them and their users with the idea, thus creating new modalities of reality through the expression of memory and shared experience. A nexus is a center or synergy of related things. A meme nexus, therefore, is a synergy of memetic propagation, an ephemeral and ever-changing collective memory: the Internet. I wish my emails were not always so tangential and out of context but it is what it is. Hope all is well with you, take care
Jennifer said,
November 7, 2006 at 11:02 am
I think I write to you because even though I haven’t met you and I don’t personally know you, there are certain things that I feel like I need to tell you, Im not sure what purpose they serve if any at all, but I am just doing what I feel I need to do. But why do I feel I should tell you about the internet? (maybe because I found it interesting to ponder and thought you also may like to think about it, I guess that is all. It’s like in “Waking Life” when the two people are in bed and they are talking about the crossword puzzle and how when the idea is already out there and so people just instinctively can like tune into it and know it, the internet is fascinating because all the information is out there now we just have to figure out how to channel the information to get what we want, or something of the sort, alright Im rambling.. .. goodnight