The unveiled city
2018-2019. Interactive data visualization. Custom table, printed graphic (framed).
Description and concept
The project consists of an interactive data visualization that enables the detection of patterns of Tokyo cultural representation on Instagram. By a system of crawling data from the web, a database of 40,851 images was obtained. The system collects photos shared on Instagram that have labeled Tokyo by hashtags in 47 different languages. An Image Caption Generation model (Vinyals, Toshev, Bengio, & Erhan, 2016) was applied to those photos. From the resulting descriptions, the main “motifs” (words with the highest semantic content) were obtained using Natural Language Processing (Bird & Loper, 2004). When a viewer interacts with the installation, the work displays the images with the most recurring motifs in each of the languages, the descriptions, and the hashtags associated with the images.
References
- Bird, S., & Loper, E. (2004). NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit. ACL Home Association for Computational Linguistics, 214–217. Retrieved SEP 09, 2020, from https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P04-3031
- Vinyals, O., Toshev, A., Bengio, S., & Erhan, D. (2016). Show and Tell: Lessons learned from the 2015 MSCOCO Image Captioning Challenge. IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. XX (No. XX ). doi:DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2016.2587640
Technical specifications
Title: The unveiled city
Año: 2018-2019
Technique: Interactive data visualization. PC, TV (58”, 4K), webcam, mechanical arm, custom table (wood and pipes), printed graphic (framed).
Dimensions: Variable, minimum: 3m x 2m
Edition: 2 + 2PA. There is a unreleased high scale version of the project.
Shows:
- June 7, 2019. As part of the solo show <H1> Hello Tokyo </ h1>. ARTnSHELTER Gallery, Tokyo, Japan.
Credits
Direction y concept: Yonlay Cabrera
Implementation advisor: Luis Diago
Programming: Gustavo Viera, Antonio Serrano
Production: Tama Art University Graduate School, Information Design Department; Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Science (MIMS).
