10×10

Jonathan Harris’s new work is dazzling. It’s called 10×10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time, and it provides an automatically generated snapshot of the world, based on what the current news are reporting.

Harris employs an algorithm to scan several online news sources and linguistically rank the most prevalent keywords. Harris’s program then captures related photographs and arranges them on a 10×10 grid.

Harris aptly calls himself an “information artist” and he’s got me wondering, how can more people become information artists? How can we take control over the ceaseless flow of data in our lives, much of it ugly, more of it depressing, and the rest trivial, and turn it into something artful, something beautiful?