Pulse is a live visualization project by Berlin-based artist Markus Kison. It’s based around a shapeshifting, heart-like object that reacts to the emotions expressed by the authors of private weblogs on blogger.com. A program aggregates words in blogs’ text and scans for synonyms that correlate with the emotional concepts in Robert Plutchik’s three-dimensional circumplex model describing the psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. The more the emotions are represented, the more corresponding portion of the organism is mechanically activated. Blurring the lines between art and technology, Pulse uses data to create a very organic visualization.
