Abstract

Keywords: Data Visualization, Hashtag wars, Twitter, Brazil Presidential Elections, Social Media, Assembly of God, trolls, bots, Political Crystals, Silicon Valley, Digital Fabrication, Altered Reality, Virtual Reality, Digital Fabrication, Parametric Design, Morphogenetic Design, Algorithmic Design.

This paper presents and critically discusses the installation “Political Crystals: Numinous Hashtags” (2018) – a poetic exploration of the ironic numinous aspects of Brazilian 2018 presidential elections. Combining parametric modeling generative strategies for data visualization with digital fabrication, the work includes the algorithmic design of a series of geometrically intricate models using as raw data Twitter APIs to perform sequential data analysis and conversions having as the Search phrase hashtags related to Brazilian 2018 presidential elections Twitted from defined geolocation. From one perspective, the 3D shapes can be seen as aggressive and sharp materialization of online hashtags’ wars that includes metadata tags. From another perspective, the translucent 3D shapes and its sophisticated data-based generative modeling evoke sublime and numinous aspects of natural crystal cluster such as quartz crystals while hiding the dramatic force of a manipulated faithful army in spreading hate discourses against minorities, defending a populism that returns to its fascist origins in Latin America.

• Clarissa Ribeiro, Ph.D. in Arts, Former Fulbright Scholar in Arts, M.Arch, B.Arch, chair of the first Leonardo ISAST LASER talks to be organized in Brazil, directs the CrossLab research group and art collective and the LIP Lab for Innovation and Prototyping at the University of Fortaleza, Brazil. She was an Associate Professor forRoy Ascott Studio B.A. in Technoetic Arts in Shanghai in 2015, after one year (2013-2014) collaborating with the Art|Sci Center and Lab at UCLA in Los Angeles as a Fulbright Post-Doctoral Research Scholar in Arts. From 2009/2010 she was a Ph.D. researcher at the CAiiA node of the Planetary Collegium, University of Plymouth, UK, by the time she was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Sao Paulo, and a member of Gilbertto Prado’s art collective Poéticas Digitais. Her artistic and research interests converges in the exploration of consciousness and the self as emergences from local and nonlocal communication phenomena in macro, micro, molecular and subatomic scales.

Full text (PDF) p. 240-246

The author would like to thank Erikson Queiroz Costa, a collaborator at the LIP – Lab for Innovation and Prototyping, who helped 3D printing the models.