EXPERIMENT: Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall (Processing)

“Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall…”

I have been wanting to play with Processing canvases that reflect one’s social state on the web, and I finally got around to it.

Above is a screen grab of my Processing canvas – the logic is simple: dip into twitter search and streaming api, and as an individual’s twitter retweets / mentions are found, reveal a bit more of his persona.

The revelation of the above image (my own) is done through a simple algorithm – start from a single origin, and fork out slowly based on rate of twitter references, with the growth rate being directly linked to the number of retweets / mentions.

The canvas, slow in emergence for me, works best for twitter celebs.

I am still tweaking the visual style, and the underlying logic, but I find the idea of visualizing identity emergence extremely compelling.