(AOS) Human Ecosystems

(AOS) Human Ecosystems

Human Ecosystems (HE) is a a project by Italian duo Artisopensource (AOS, Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico). It is family of real-time system capturing information from social networks to visualize cities’ human geographies and affective flows. Human beings generate an enormous amount of public information during their daily lives to express their emotions, desires, visions and ideas. Using a set of technologies to map public communication flows on social networks in the city, this project reclaims a novel form of public space: the human infoscape. HE seeks to achieve new understanding of the ways in which different cultures express opinions, emotions and affect. Most importantly, it seeks to reveal how cities’ relational ecosystems are formed and which roles different people assume in their communities (influencers, hubs, experts, amplifiers, bridges among different communities etc…). HE has been launched in Rome (Italy) and S.Paulo (Brazil) producing accessible OpenData maps and visualizations that can be monitored in time and space, revealing the emergence of entirely different cities within the same city, their affective flows, their aggregations and diasporic streams.

AOS launched HE Toronto during a visit at York University’s Digital Media Lab and ArtSci Salon in February 2014