Survey Field (2003)

Survey Field is an internet project conceived by artist Germaine Koh and realized with the collaboration of Artengine. It is an experiment in the representation of public opinion and online communities.

Survey Field collects the opinions of large number of participants on a series of questions, and presents each of these in the form of a grid of coloured points. Each individual participant's response is located within the grid roughly according to his/her geographical location (approximated according to an abstracted world map). According to the opinion he/she submits, this point appears red (no), green (yes), blue (maybe) or unlit.

Because the nature of light is that its red, blue and green components visually combine into other distinct primary colours, the array records incremental yet imprecise tendencies in popular opinion, with as much emphasis on the realms of uncertainty as on the 'clear' opinions themselves (ie. apparent cyan, magenta ...

Full Description

Survey Field is an internet project conceived by artist Germaine Koh and realized with the collaboration of Artengine. It is an experiment in the representation of public opinion and online communities.

Survey Field collects the opinions of large number of participants on a series of questions, and presents each of these in the form of a grid of coloured points. Each individual participant's response is located within the grid roughly according to his/her geographical location (approximated according to an abstracted world map). According to the opinion he/she submits, this point appears red (no), green (yes), blue (maybe) or unlit.

Because the nature of light is that its red, blue and green components visually combine into other distinct primary colours, the array records incremental yet imprecise tendencies in popular opinion, with as much emphasis on the realms of uncertainty as on the 'clear' opinions themselves (ie. apparent cyan, magenta and yellow indicate mixtures of yes-maybe, no-maybe, and yes-no respectively, while secondary colours and grey tones indicate more mixed responses). Visually, the result is an unstable colour field whose subtle variations indicate shades of public opinion.

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