Jonathan Harris - no, the other one.

Yeah no, you mean the actor from Lost in Space? With the really rubbery skin, right? Yeah, the one with the same birthday as me. No, that's not who I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the other Jonathan Harris, groundbreaking media artist. I've seen projects of his so many times, but never looked into their origin. Bad, bad Beckstar.

You could say his work tries to document and experiment with human experience using the internet. You could call him the world's best data artist. Or you could just check out his stuff:


10x10 uses Reuters, BBC and the NYTimes to create an unregulated snapshot into images and words that are making headlines. As Harris explains:

With no human editors and no regulation, 10x10 is open and free, raw and fresh, and consequently a unique way of following world events. In 10x10, we respond instinctively to patterns in the grid, visual indicators of relevance. When we see a frequently repeated image, we know it’s important. When we see a picture of a movie star next to a picture of dead bodies, we understand the extremes that exist in our world. Scanning a grid of pictures can be more intuitive than reading headlines, for it lets the news come to life, and everything feels a bit less distant, a bit closer to heart, and maybe, if we're lucky, gives us pause to think.

We feel fine is an engine that basically harvests text and image from blog entries containing phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". Representing each as a tiny coloured ball, the site is a buzzing, living map of authentic human emotion.


More We feel fine. This is from an anorexic girl's blog.


More We feel fine.


WordCount is an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked and scaled in order of commonness and arranged side by side as a very long sentence (quoted from Harris' site). Star is number 1549, and the 666th most commonly used English word is Easy. A neat interface.


Some of his great information map work.


More of his great information map work.

I love that these moving and though-provoking works of art come from something completely mundane - collecting and representing sets of data. If I was half the interactive artist he is... I would be ready to retire.