Hasta La Ideas

Photos by Jess Chen unless otherwise noted

Illustration by Ray Hu

“I remember talking to college classmates of mine, there was this general feeling of like anxiety and panic about what our lives were going to be like and the choices we were going to have to make once college ended… I just want to give you the message that it’s all going to be cool in the end. It doesn’t really matter that much the choices you make as long as you keep alert enough and nimble enough to keep changing course along the way.”

Jonathan Harris spoke to a full auditorium at the Rhode Island School of Design last Thursday, telling stories from his life and some turning points that happened along the way. An artist, programmer, and world explorer, Harris’s work focuses on humanizing the Internet in a rapidly expanding digital age.

Harris framed the lecture in four parts chronologically, around turning points in his own life: Internet, Real Life, My Life, Our Lives. Starting with his early twenties, Harris spoke about his focus on the Internet and on looking for stories hiding in data. An interest in collecting found objects led him to the concept of “partial obstruction, partial revelation”—the idea that in leaving space, it allows people to come closer and fill that space with their own experiences. He applied this technique to a lot of his early web work.

Jonathan Harris – “I Want You To Want Me” (2008)

“I actually saw the web as a very human place. I saw all of this data, this messy data, that was there had been put there by people and so it was very human. I was very interested in demonstrating this principle when I was a kid, that the web was actually a very human place.”

An attempt to “tease out some of the poetry” from the mess of the Internet led to several projects, including We Feel Fine. Essentially a search engine for feeling, We Feel Fine scans the latest blog posts every two or three minutes looking for phrases following ‘I feel…’ or ‘I am feeling…’ Those phrases are collected in a database including the gender, age, and location of the author, as well as the weather conditions when they wrote the sentence. Since its genesis seven years ago, We Feel Fine has amassed about 20 million feelings.

Jonathan Harris – We Feel Fine (2006)

Changing courses dramatically, Harris concluded his first quadrant with a few thoughts on data. “I think data is a very good approach for certain types of insights that you’re after, but it’s an incredibly limited approach for other insights and it can actually lead to quite superficial insights a lot of the time.” Harris no longer believed, as he did in his twenties, that life’s problems could be solved through data. Starting to feel like there was a level of depth his data-based projects weren’t reaching, Harris began to do projects that involved intense real-world experiences documented himself.

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