80 talking teddy bears stream categorized emotional content from the internet with different voices
Music accompanies each one-minute long emotional sequence
Reflected spotlights illuminate the active bear
Laptop gives real-time feedback and allows audience to interact with installation
Audience can send text message or voice message to the bears
Minimum dimensions 20' wide x 8' high, can also be spread around a large room

About the Installation

The internet is aptly named a worldwide web, for it is truly the labyrinth of our civilization. It is the playground where humanity weaves its themes and shares its struggle to understand the human condition.

The installation piece T,E.D. (Sadalbari Research and Development) distils the overwhelming and cacophonous reality of the internet's emotional content into a series of one minute events, categorized by emotion and presented by dozens of customized teddy bears.

Throughout the T,E.D. experience, rows of bears with moving eyes and mouths deliver monologues of narrative provided by internet content such as blogs. Content is filtered and categorized by software developed by Sean Hathaway. Various speech engines are used to deliver the phrases to the selected doll via MIDI as music by composer Carlos Severe Marcelin accompanies each one-minute emotional sequence. MIDI is also used to control the lights and mirrors which direct a spotlight to the appropriate bear.

T,E.D. is interactive. In addition to running autonomously from live streams, the audience can text message or call 559-TXT-2-TED and their statements will get emotionally categorized and put at the top of the cue.

The emotional classification scheme was developed by Robert Plutchick in his 1980 paper Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis. The scheme involves a wheel of primary emotions laid out in a color-wheel like representation. The circle face represents the relationship of primary, pure emotions of the highest intensity. The shape represents layers of emotional intensity decreasing from the pure, intense emotional state to the point of zero intensity like various hues in color. Like the color wheel analogy, the eight pure emotions of various hues can be mixed to produce the full landscape of human emotion.

In T,E.D., Sean Hathaway takes RSS Feeds from thousands of resources and, breaking each down into their primary emotional components, classifies them using Plutchick's roadmap. The events are then cued and partnered up with their musical counterparts and the resulting analog and digital signals are sent to the output devices at the appropriate time. The api to grab phrases with the word "feel" in them was developed by We Feel Fine www.wefeelfine.org/api.html

The music was composed by Carlos Severe Marcelin as a collection of twenty-four 1 minute variations on a theme. Each piece is based on one of the pedals from Plutchick's Emotion Wheel. The instrumentation and amount of variation from the consonant central theme is inspired by the relation of the emotion in question to the center of the Wheel.

Audiences are transfixed when hearing T,E.D.'s atomic interpretations of humanities emotions and the work is a truly creative convergence of technology and art.

Circuit Board designed by Sean Hathaway's Sadalbari Research and Development:

Credits:

Sean Hathaway - creator, designer, engineer, emotional coding, construction
Carlos Severe Marcelin - music, producer, emotional coding, construction
Jonathan Harris (www.wefeelfine.org) - web engine
Lyndsay Hogland - consultant
Jason Hildner - prop maker
Kelly Brewer - emotional coding, construction
Ken Hathaway - construction
Miranda Neubert - construction
Clay - inspiration and radiators
Roger Hyde - technical consultant
Luke Norby - space and time
Stacy Hathaway - emotional inspiration
Wacky Willies - best artistic surplus store