Poetracking

conf-3-Poetracking1
Jorge Andrés Gomez, Baptiste Ingrand, Florine Morsetin. “Poetracking” (2014)

“Poetracking” asks you to draw a tree, and uses your drawing to generate a short poem. After a few moments, your poem and drawing disappear, and you are shown the many trees drawn by others, each alongside its generated poem. The project draws from the Baum personality test, which aims to show a patient’s main personality traits and emotions by analysing the way he or she represents a tree on a sheet of paper. For instance, small trunks indicate introversion and low self-esteem, while large trunks imply strength, higher self-esteem and vitality. By only analysing a few aspects of the user’s drawing (colours, line width and position on the page), “Poetracking” highlights the weaknesses of the Baum test, and is designed to point out how subjective it can be. Rather than simply convert the user’s perceived emotions and personality traits into raw data, as is done by Facebook and other entities for advertising and surveillance purposes, “Poetracking” converts the data into poetry, itself open to further interpretation. A lyrical feedback is generated through the openness and subjectivity offered by the generated poem that can be seen as reconfiguring the reader’s whole interaction

Norwegian/Norsk
Du blir bedt om å tegne et tre. Når du er ferdig, kommer et dikt tilsyne på skjermen, generert ut fra Baums personlighetstest som tolker en pasients personlighet og følelser ut fra hvordan han eller hun tegner et tre: en tykk stamme tyder på styrke og høy selvfølelse mens en tynn stamme tyder på en introvert med lav selvfølelse. “Poetracking” kan leses som en kritikk av personlighetstester, men også som en kommentar til overvåkningssamfunnet hvor våre valg på nettet i økende grad tolkes og selges som fasiter på våre personligheter.