YH: At Yale, you are launching a Human Ecosystem project,collecting data posted to social media sites in New Haven and aggregating your findings. What motivates you to organize and display a city’s technological discourse?
Iaconesi: As citizens of the world, we use social media in peculiar ways. We increasingly use these platforms to express everyday thoughts and communicate with one another. But when we do so on sites like Facebook and Twitter, we give up our ownership of our expressions. As soon as we post something, it is no longer our content. Though we are still recognized as its authors, we don’t own it. The Human Ecosystem project will heighten our awareness to the effects of using such platforms, which, unfortunately, have not yet become public spaces.
When you say something aloud in public, you contribute to public discourse. For example, if you say “I am afraid that I will lose my job,” in public, your expression becomes part of communal exchange. Many people think that social media platforms are places for public discussion, but in reality, the only people benefiting from and using the opinions posted online are developers of these sites, and maybe the NSA or CIA. They are using our data, but we are not yet collectively analyzing and using the expressions posted online that reflect society to improve upon it. Ironically, the ones excluded from accessing these conversations are the citizens themselves.
YH: Are citizens excluded from accessing online conversations, or have they not yet used them productively and collectively to examine civic issues?
Iaconesi: They are excluded from these conversations. If you have a public debate, anyone can access it. But if the debate is online, on, say, Facebook, there is no public access. If you are a tree in a forest, you can see your neighboring trees, but you don’t have a bird’s-eye view of the entire forest. You do not know if there is a forest fire outside of your immediate surroundings.
And so my team and I are capturing all of the data posted to these sites in New Haven. We only use what is posted publically, data that we don’t even need to log in to sites to access. We collect it and process what is posted to understand the popular topics of interest, the emotions expressed, and the relations within this city. We turn the data into an open source. Then, we create visualizations with the processed data.
We have done this in a number of cities, and it has engaged the public. For example, we established the Real-Time Museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Citizens from schoolchildren to the elderly visit this museum, but instead of viewing paintings or statues, they view the relationships within their city in the graphics we have created. We use these visualizations to answer big-picture questions—the data can tell us where the highest concentration of financial insecurity is (parts of the city map we created will light up when a question such as “where are most people fearful that they will lose their jobs?” is asked).
In part of the museum, there is a planetarium. The people are represented as stars, and constellations illustrate the relationships among them. When you ask the visualization certain questions, parts of this solar system lights up. By seeing this visual map of your city, you find communities, and you can find where you fit in your community and where people are concentrated who care about the same civic issues as you do.
YH: What is the value of these data visualizations, both aesthetically and instrumentally?
Iaconesi: Aesthetically, I think they are beautiful, complex, and organic. They are symbolic of our dynamic cities. These visuals are art—they are not paintings, they are the encapsulations of the cultures and concerns of an entire city.
And they are very useful graphics. Part of my artistic process is educating people on how to use this data. The visualizations are tools. We host workshops for designers, policymakers, engineers, and other citizen groups. We do so to reverse a situation in which people are providing their opinions and expressions to be used by corporations and salespeople, so that they can reclaim their data and use it to improve upon their communities.
At all of these workshops, participants form a common knowledge, a familiarity with their human ecosystems that is channeled productively. For example, after a workshop in Sao Paulo, a participant created a musical symphony that reacts in real time to the emotions felt within the city, using the data we collected. When you play it in different parts of the city, you get an auditory understanding of how most people feel there. In Rome, a workshop participant created a mobile phone app after a workshop, which works as an emotional compass. Instead of indicating geographic directions, it indicates levels of joy around the city.
Participating in workshops and understanding what goes on within your city with a bird’s-eye view expands your perception of what it is possible for citizens to know about each other and of what can be done with this information. It motivates civic action and organization, and includes the people of a city in its planning. Citizens engage in collective decision-making.
YH: Have you found that Human Ecosystem projects transform the way people post on social media sites?
Iaconesi: Absolutely. People don’t even understand how much data sites like Facebook have about them. If you have a private message conversation on Facebook about a vacation in the Bahamas, ads will run on your sidebar that are relevant to that conversation. Once you realize how this information is used, you use these sites more critically. Perhaps you will expose less of yourself, but perhaps you will use it for more interesting and productive purposes. Have you found that Human Ecosystem projects transform the way people post on social media sites?
YH: Have your Human Ecosystems projects also influenced what you post online?
Iaconesi: Well, I’m a hacker. I have always been aware of how personal data is used by corporations and governments. I use social networks for professional communication, and am wary about the private data that I post.
It’s incredible—a friend researched how many Facebook users actually read its terms of service, and found that close to zero percent do. But the Facebook community is about the size of the second largest country in the world. And Facebook knows more about its citizens than even the most severe dictatorship would. Facebook’s privacy laws affect 1.3 billion people, and Facebook can change those laws simply by altering a line in its terms of service. If, for example, Italy, my country, wanted to change its privacy laws, there would be publicized governmental and parliamentary action, that would involve the senate, the president, and the European Commission. We must be aware of how Facebook uses its data, and use it in turn to do something positive for our communities.
YH: Though you are well aware of how social media platforms work and thus don’t post much personal information, you crowd-sourced a cure for your cancer in 2012, and publicized your medical documents, which seems like deeply personal information. How does your relationship to these sites relate to your project La Cura?
Iaconesi: Ah, La Cura has a different meaning for my life than my everyday use of online platforms. I don’t know if you know what it feels like to get a disease like cancer. You disappear. You are replaced by data. It is a horrible thing. People stop speaking about you as a human being, but rather as a patient, a simplified version of a human. A patient is merely composed of lab results, of data, of images. Everyone, from doctors to your insurance company to friends to relatives, talks about your data. Through La Cura, I reclaimed ownership of this data. I published my medical history not to find a cure for my cancer in a technical way, but to share my cancer with society and bring back my humanity. It was a bio-political performance.
This public display of data has a different goal than my Human Ecosystems projects—I exposed data not to solve socio-cultural problems, but to regain my humanity and to challenge the way that society regards cancer and its patients.
I was surprised by how many people, hundreds of thousands, responded to La Cura. And that was the real cure to my cancer, this societal reaction. From laymen to street artists to designers to engineers to philosophers, people sent me feedback about how to cure my cancer. Ordinary people were discussing their roles in society and what they could do to help me with my disease. Artists found that they could do a lot. Children found that they could do a lot. Anyone can work to bring a person, not a patient, back into society, rendering cancer a shared experience. I created a visualization graphic with data of all of the relationships formed through La Cura, from conversations posted on social networks and in discussion forums. The most beautiful thing is that I am not in the center of this visualization. The project is not about me, it’s about how an entire society can humanize cancer patients.
YH: What sort of discussions do you think your work in New Haven will inspire? Though the Human Ecosystems project you are conducting here has a different goal, in what ways do you think people will unite, and what sort of communal problems will be addressed?
Iaconesi: It’s too soon to say. My team and I have just begun collecting our data. And I do not have any specific hopes when I start such a project. It is not my time to hope. It is time for the citizens of New Haven to hope, to use the visualizations we will produce meaningfully. As with La Cura, the project is not about me, it is about society. I am very anxious to see how the city and the campus interact, and what permeabilities exist in New Haven. Once the data is collected and processed and channeled into graphics, we will hold workshops and exhibit the data in City Hall. As in Sao Paulo, we will create interactive installations, and hope that Yale students will join us in exploring what people worry about and value throughout New Haven, and how we can use this information to change our society and move it forward.
—Interview condensed by the reporter