An Obelisk That Oozes Paint, in Tune With a City’s Social Feeds

This oozing paint visualizes the mood of tweets coming from Oslo. Source/GIF: WIRED

With so many people broadcasting their feelings on social media, we’re reaching a point where we can reasonably say we’re able to discern the mood of a city at a given moment. A group of artists in Oslo came up with a striking way of visualizing that emerging data set: a tiny monolith that oozes different colors of paint depending on the tweets published around it.

“Monolitt” was created by Syver Lauritzsen and Eirik Haugen Murvoll, a pair of students at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. From the start, the duo was captivated by the idea of representing social media, a very new phenomenon, with paint, one of our most enduring materials. But arriving at the final design involved some experimentation.

First, they played around with paintballs, which were nice and visceral, but ultimately too modern to achieve the contrast the duo was hoping for (when you think about it, is there any more Twitter-like way to apply paint than paintballs?) Eventually, they came across the work of an artist named Holton Rower, whose three-dimensional paintings, made by pouring layers of paint over various shapes, served as inspiration for their oozing tower.