InfoLab "BUZZ" Project unveiled at 8th Annual Chicago Improv Festival

April 19, 2005

EVANSTON, Ill. -- A new high-tech audio visual installation developed by Northwestern University’s Program in Network Arts, called Buzz, will be on display from April 22nd through May 1st at the Athenaeum Theater as a part of the 8th Annual Chicago Improv Festival.

The Program in Network Arts is an initiative of the department of computer science of Northwestern’s Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. Its aim is to enable the creation of a set of software agents that use the machine and the network as a medium for artistic and cultural communication rather than a simple computational device. Buzz succeeds The Imagination Environment, an installation exhibited at Second City at Chicago’s Piper’s Alley.

Buzz exposes and explores the collective buzz generated by blogs. Using the most popular searches of the moment (displayed on a central screen), it finds the blogs that are reflections of the questions of our time. It embodies the blogger with virtual actors, displayed on surrounding displays, who externalize these soliloquies by reading them aloud.

Buzz was created by Kristian J. Hammond, a professor at Northwestern University, Sara Owsley and David A. Shamma, graduate students of Northwestern’s Intelligent Information Laboratory. They created a system that not only mines the Web for information but also for point of view.

“The internet is a living, breathing reflection of who we are, what we think, and how we feel. Blogs are the latest embodiment of this cultural reflection,” noted Hammond, director of Intelligent Information Laboratory. “The existence of millions of blogs on the web is more than the mere presence of millions of online journals, but rather, they generate a collective buzz around events in the world.”

The installation creates and directs its own performance. “Using the current most popular topics on the web, Buzz’s actors reveal what people are saying about each topic. They detect the blogger’s emotional state, using technology that we’ve developed, and use that to drive their performance,” said Owsley.

“We are excited about having Buzz at the Chicago Improv Festival because, like improvisers, it goes beyond the events of the day, to a point of view,” commented Jonathan Pitts, Co-Founder and Executive Producer of the Chicago Improv Festival.

Check out the festival schedule here.

Check out Buzz here