how we feel now is offered up in the spirit of We Feel Fine: a landmark work of digital art and data humanism created by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar in 2006.

We Feel Fine crawled the English-language blogosphere every ten minutes for sentences containing "I feel" or "I am feeling," pairing each fragment with the weather at the moment of writing. Over its lifetime it collected more than twelve million feelings.

Harris and Kamvar called it "a human-scale project masquerading as a data project." The six movements — Madness, Murmur, Mobs, Paths, Montage, Mounds — each offered a different way of holding what the whole might look like.

The blogosphere represents a different time. Things change. Platforms mould. Many of the places we share our feelings are not openly accessible like Blogger and LiveJournal were in 2006. But we are still desperate to share and connect and let people know how we feel.

how we feel now draws on the same impulse. The sources have changed — the blogosphere has given way to Mastodon and the Bluesky firehose — but the sentences remain. The online world feels a bit more fragmented, less whimsical and fun, more serious and angry and prone to outbursts. That may be due to size, or design, or the nature of the world outside of our data centres and screens and bedrooms. However, it is the fact that we feel — it is emotion — that connects us all as humans. Age, gender, race, religion, opinion, politics: all of these things can be different, but undeniably — we all feel. And it is the fact we feel that unifies us.

We are grateful to Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar for demonstrating that data can be tender, that a machine can listen, and that the internet, for all its noise, is full of people writing sentences about how they feel.

feelings gathered from mastodon.social & bsky.app · weather from open-meteo.com