State Drawings and Placebos

Filed under Open Workshop, projects

Event Information

Artist: Vaibhav Bhawsar
Website: http://recombine.net/affective/

A web+SMS application that allows one to record and share their day visually in terms of sensations, feelings/emotions, whereabouts and moods using SMS, and in return receive placebo responses.

This project is two part. One is to log all the placebo responses (generated by this application) to the moods/feelings you send to this system. These placebo responses depend on two variables- the current weather and your mood. A response is sent to you via SMS and logged on a website. These SMSs are further used in the second part of the application outlined bellow.

The second part is a remote drawing application which you can control using SMS. This remote drawing application helps you create mental maps of your day using a mobile phone and SMS. These expressive line drawings are initiated when you send specific messages(commands) to the application via your cell phone. As the day passes and you send more messages to the system, the drawing or map is appended with appropriate visual representations. You can think of it as a visual log or what I have tentatively called ‘State Drawings’ of your feelings and thoughts. The resulting map of your day is geographically incorrect and does not necessarily tie geographic places with feelings or emotions. It instead draws subjective and psychogeographic states of you as an individual by processing the feelings and moods you send through the day (interpreting them as drawing commands). At the end of each day the map is archived and a new map is initiated at the beginning of next day. A mockup of what such drawings might look like and more info is available on the project site.