COLORS

What if the moods of people around the world could be visualized?

The COLORS project is a web-based initiative that records and visualizes the emotions of people worldwide. Launched in the mid-2000s, at the height of the social media boom, it is renowned for its artistic exploration of individual media expression and the collective social consciousness.

The project utilizes a robotic engine that automatically collects emotion-related vocabulary from blogs across the globe, scanning them every ten minutes. These emotions are categorized into six distinct groups: impressed, happy, peaceful, anxious, sad, and angry. The words are recorded in a database, along with the URLs of the blogs where they were found. The system scans approximately half a million blogs each day.

The database is then visualized through a website designed like a picture book, featuring images of the Earth and the universe. Each day, human-shaped icons in six different colors—representing the six emotional categories—appear on Earth, symbolizing the dominant emotions of that day. After 24 hours, these “people” transform into “stars” and ascend into the universe, creating a celestial map of past emotions. All icons, whether stars or human figures, are clickable, allowing users to view the specific words and links to the original blogs from which they were drawn. Additionally, the database is used to display daily and annual graphs showing the balance of the six emotions. The project also includes a system that automatically compiles a digest of the database and generates a film.

What does the COLORS project reveal? At first glance, it may seem like a mere collection of everyday activities of anonymous individuals. However, we believe that despite its seemingly trivial nature, this approach—focusing on the lives of individuals—will prove to be a significant element in the field of information media technology. The COLORS project is a recording device designed to share this perspective on the grandest scale: humanity.

This work was an international project presented at the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan.