The Question
We all leave digital footprints. Data that is collected, filtered, analysed. But how can stories be generated from Big Data?
The Answer
By deliberately producing data, we were able to filter it back out. We used social networks and the spectrum of possibilities that only emerges through the interconnection of numerous social services – and their creative misuse.
the intertwingled is (very probably) the world's first story whose elements were actions in real space, translated into a linear narrative via pre-programmed commands and made readable in an entirely new way.
The Experiment
Over six hours, 5 actors moved through Berlin following a loosely interpretable screenplay, carrying out around 30 actions in total. Together, they created a story that inscribed itself into social networks and the Big Data mass through location data, posts, social connections and photos – and was simultaneously translated into a shared narration on theintertwingled.tumblr.com.
A narration that goes far beyond a simple chain of plot elements – it is both part and result of a three-stage translation process.
The Process
Inscribe, Rewrite, Record – At the core always stood the actual action and its resulting data: location data, date and time, text elements. In a second step, we broke this data down into story-relevant building blocks, only to reassemble them in a third step into sections of a new narrative.
All of this was achieved using IFTTT (if this then that), a web-based service that enables the combination of various services through simple templates, so that specific triggers – such as a friend's movement data – automatically initiate new actions.
With just 35 IFTTT recipes, we managed to auto-generate additional posts from the 30 actions of 5 actors, which – combined with a wealth of freely available data like current time or humidity – ultimately became individual paragraphs of a shared story.
Dual Traceability
The story is characterised by a kind of "dual traceability". On the one hand, the reader finds the linear narration on the blog theintertwingled.tumblr.com. On the other hand, the Facebook profiles also tell a story that the audience can follow.
While the blog aims to present all individual character stories within a meaningful linear context, the profiles allow readers to trace the subjective perception of each character. This shift in perspective represents a new approach to narrative in digital space: it unites hypertextuality with linearity, leaving it entirely up to the reader which path to take or which perspective to adopt.
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