Everyone is asking, “Who won last night’s debate?”
We like to think that we, as humans, are far more advanced computational beings than computers, but we sure act like a bunch of computers. Considering the effective bit depth and resolution of our squishy neural networks, we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about ones and zeros. Win or lose. Red or blue. Right or wrong. Them or us. This or that.
Every four years our nation’s potential leaders throw off the gloves and duke it out on the big stage. For the previous two elections, Sosolimited performed live audiovisual remixes of these Presidential Debates. This year, we’ve upped the stakes with our newest project, ReConstitution 2012. Part data visualization, part experimental typography, ReConstitution 2012 is a live web app linked to the televised US Presidential Debates. We are partnering with our good friends at The Creators Project to make it happen. Our site will be live for the 2nd debate on October 16.
The goal of the piece is to provide a massively annotated play-by-play of the candidates’ verbal jousting. During and after the three debates, language used by the candidates generates a live graphical map of the events. Algorithms track the psychological states of Romney and Obama and compare them to past candidates. The app allows the user to get beyond the punditry and discover the hidden meaning in the words chosen by the candidates. We teamed up with Professor James Pennebaker and his longtime researcher Cindy Chung at the UT Austin Department of Psychology to bring their natural language processing algorithms to a live application.
Dear OpenFrameworks Peoples,
When we started Sosolimited, we dove head first into the OpenFrameworks universe and have never looked back. We’ve marveled at the growth of the OF code base and community over the last few years. It’s a staggering body of work and an incredibly powerful tool. We’re slow to the party, but after almost three years of coding with OpenFrameworks, we’re sharing our OpenFrameworks addon, ofxSoso.
It’s been a dream of ours to develop and install a permanent television remix artwork, so we’re very excited to announce that Firebrand TV is installed at the brand new Firebrand Saints. Gary Strack, the chef and owner behind Firebrand Saints, Central Kitchen, and the Enormous Room has been a big supporter of Sosolimited since the very beginning, so we’re especially proud to launch this artwork in his new space.
Firebrand TV is a development of Set Top Box. It’s an installation that continuously watches, catalogs, and transforms live television. The piece is a five-screen video beam. The left-most screen always shows the live broadcast signal. The other four screens display a series of visual and typography transformations of the signal. Firebrand TV is a platform for live television transformation, and a development of our live remixes of the US Presidential Debates.
