A brand new art installation by Rolf van Gelder, called ‘T#Walker v1.0‘, was shown at the Eindhoven Public Library (in the ‘White Lady’) from May 31st till June 8th.
It was part of the ‘Play the Future‘ exhibition for the ‘Dutch Technology Week (DTW), 2013‘.
T#Walker is a real-time ‘Tweet-Walker’ (or ‘Tweet-Crawler’): it pulls real-time Tweets from Twitter and finds its own way in the vast Twitter world.
In fact it’s an arbitrary mirror of the world; showing what people are talking about, right now, at this very moment, linking tweets by keywords.
The way it works:
It retrieves the most recent tweets for a specific ‘keyword’ and displays them word by word, with information about that tweet (at the bottom of the screen) like the date and time it was tweeted, the Twitter name of the tweeter, the number of followers of the tweeter, the geo-location of the tweeter (if available).
The avatar of the tweeter will be displayed in the middle of the screen.
If the tweet contains a link T#Walker will show a QR-tag with the link information in the upper left corner of the screen so the visitors can scan it with their smart phone, if they like.
After the set of tweets has been displayed the next ‘keyword’ will be picked from all the words in the previous set of tweets:
User interaction:
The flow of T#Walker can be influenced by the visitors of the exhibition by sending tweets to Twitter.
The tweets should contain the hashtag #twalker2013, followed by a space and exactly one keyword.
For instance: #twalker2013 library
The installation will pick up the visitors keywords and use them as a starting point for further crawling.
