I googled Jonathan Harris tonight, looking for more information on the founder of http://cowbird.com. What I knew about him from reading his stories on cowbird was that he has quite a following, is prolific in terms of photography and storytelling (557 stories on cowbird alone!), travels a lot and spends time in many different settings. He knows people all over the world and has somehow brought them together on his site. He describes himself as an “artist, brother, computer scientist, nomad, seeker, storyteller.” Oh, and he seems very young and is very good looking.
It turns out, there’s a video lecture by him on TED. As I watched it, I was able to fill in more. He’s a conceptual artist, using technology, specifically the internet and programs he writes, to visualize communication on the internet. The several projects he talks about in the lecture explore emotion and the internet. In one project, he develops a program to search and identify sentences posted in blogs that include the words “I feel” or “I am feeling,” grab the sentence containing these words and an image if available, and repost the information on another site, “We Feel Fine.” The site then organizes and displays the data in many ways, including assigning temperatures and colors to the feelings and representing them visually by warm or cool, happy or sad.
It’s impressive in terms of technology and it does make one think. Can we get a picture of the feelings of the world as posted on the internet? Why are all these people publishing their feelings? Is every sentence that includes “I feel” really expressing a feeling? Can the computer really caputre these feelings? Can art of this kind make us feel or convey feeling? What is the relationship between image and word and… feeling?
One thing that resonates with me is the way he considers narrative and image. This is something that I’ve been engaged with as I’ve written and posted to cowbird.com. The posts require and image to be complete. I have a lot of images, but I also find myself wondering if images I’m using are “safe” to use. Do they belong to other people’s stories? Even the archival images– when I attach them to a story, does it affect the people portayed there, the original context?
I have long been interested, also, in visual storytelling. I always think of coming across a bunch of my father’s scorebooks from our girls’ softball days in Park Forest and realizing that they were incredibly detailed visual stories. My father, a statistician to the core, has devised his own complicated systems for coding games, including football and basketball. These softball score books used a fairly standard system, and I sat down and read them. I often thought they would have made for an interesting piece in an exhibit on visual narrative and wish I had gotten a hold of them before they were thrown away.
It was in that spirit, under the spell of Jonathan Harris’s conceptual explorations, that I wrote this story for cowbird: “My Father’s Book of Stories.”
What visual stories do you know?