‘After Life’ At Atheneum Turns An Eye Toward Twitterverse

Mika Tajima, the 177th artist to show her work at Wadsworth Atheneum’s MATRIX gallery, is fascinated by infrastructures.

“I’m interested in the way they shape our lives, both built environments and invisible infrastructures like technology,” she says.

The invisible infrastructure Tajima examines in her exhibit, “After Life,” is Twitter. Tweets show what people are thinking and how they feel about what they are thinking. Some thoughts are earth-changing, like melting polar ice caps. Some are important in a transitory way, like the NBA Finals. Some are meaningless, like celebrity selfies.

“Everything captured, from the mundane to the grave, is equally weighted,” she says.

Tajima asks, “Can Tweets be analyzed to foretell future tweets?” She’s not the only one asking. “That’s where all the efforts and energies are going into,” she says. “Whoever becomes best at predictive technology is going to win.”

If predicting tweets is possible, it also is possible to steer thoughts, conversations and public sentiment in specific directions.

“I want to make us aware of how we are shaped by technologies that might be softly pushing us toward certain decisions, anything from bombing Syria to buying a certain type of sneakers,” she says. “It comes down to the notion of control.”

Tajima used data-mining technology to “scrape” tweets from a segment of New York. Using the tweets as a foundation, a bot generates tweets that might occur a few minutes from now based on what is being tweeted now. The grammatically garbled bot-tweets, some English, some Spanish, scroll on a screen. As the mood of the bot-Twitterverse ebbs and flows, a “sentiment analysis program” alters the gallery lighting in intensity and color, purple (positive) to yellow (negative) to white (neutral).

The presentation is visually simple but conceptually complex and unnerving, an indicator that technologies, and their corporations, see humans as data- and sentiment-banks to be manipulated and monetized. A person leaving the gallery might wonder, Where did I get the thoughts I’m thinking? Are they really mine?

Tajima says, however, that her work is not a warning, but a lesson: “How do these things shape our lives and our views of the world? We need to be aware if we are being controlled or not.”

Tajima’s work is a good complement to Real Art Ways’ exhibit “Nothing to Hide,” about how surveillance through the Internet and other technologies encroaches on privacy. That show is up until June 19.

MIKA TAJIMA: MATRIXX 177: AFTER LIFE will be at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main St. in Hartford, until Sept. 3. thewadsworth.org.