We Feel Fine
It’s probably not fashionable to display ambition quite as boldly as the creators of We Feel Fine do. They describe their project as “an almanac of human emotion”, no less. But fashion bedamned because, however satisfying you find the results, there is something about the very attempt to capture how everyone in the world is feeling that is simply breathtaking. The fact that it is conducted in real time, before your very eyes, is more than breathtaking – it’s pretty much a first in human history.
Broadly speaking, We Feel Fine is two things: a book and a website. I haven’t seen the book but the website seems far more interesting. Its centrepiece, the We Feel Fine applet, works by randomly lifting sentences starting with the words “I feel” from countless different blogs around the world and then displaying them in various ways.
This is already quite original, but what the applet does with these nuggets of subjectivity is even more interesting. Amazingly, it gives the user a considerable amount of control over how these sentiments are organised and viewed. You can organise them by writer location, age, gender, date and so on. You can choose to have them displayed alongside “mood” images that are adjudged (by computer) to have some visual affinity with the emotions expressed verbally. There are even more ways to view the purloined phrases, but I won’t spoil the surprise by revealing them here. This is one site you really have to play around with to appreciate.
So what are we to make of We Feel Fine? Is it art? Is it sociology? It’s probably too unmediated to be art. It’s almost certainly too mercurial to be sociology. It feels more like an exemplar of some new genre, one made possible for the first time by that mad cacophony of voices we call the Internet. Whatever it is, We Feel Fine does something remarkable: it provides us with an adjustable eyepiece through which we can glimpse the sublime disorder of human life.