April 28, 2005

Display speaks bloggers' minds

“Buzz,” a new high-tech audio visual installation based on blogs and developed by Northwestern’s Program in Network Arts, continues to be on display through May 1 at the Athenaeum Theater, 2936 N. Southport Ave., Chicago, as a part of the 8th Annual Chicago Improv Festival.

The Program in Network Arts is an initiative of the department of computer science. Its aim is to enable the creation of a set of software agents that use the machine and the network as a medium for artistic and cultural communication rather than a simple computational device. Buzz succeeds The Imagination Environment, an installation at Second City at Chicago’s Piper’s Alley.

Buzz exposes and explores the collective buzz generated by blogs. Using the most popular searches of the moment (displayed on a central screen), it finds the blogs that are reflections of the questions of our time. It embodies the blogger with virtual actors, displayed on surrounding displays, that externalize these soliloquies by reading them aloud.

Buzz was created by Kristian J. Hammond, professor of computer science, and Sara Owsley and David A. Shamma, graduate students of Northwestern’s Intelligent Information Laboratory. They created a system that not only mines the Web for information but also for point of view.

“The Internet is a living, breathing reflection of who we are, what we think and how we feel. Blogs are the latest embodiment of this cultural reflection,” said Hammond, director of the Intelligent Information Laboratory. “The existence of millions of blogs on the Web is more than the mere presence of millions of online journals — they generate a collective buzz around world events.”