Universe

Universe is another masterpice by Johnathan Harris and like he explains it best, it is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone's path through Universe is different, just as everyone's path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world's contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world — a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place — and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.

Various "Stages" within Universe

Universe is divided into nine "Stages", titled: Stars, Shapes, Secrets, Stories, Statements, Snapshots, Superstars, Settings, and Time. Stars presents a cryptic star field; Shapes causes constellation outlines to emerge; Secrets extracts the most salient single words and presents them to scale; Stories extracts the sagas and events; Statements extracts the things people said; Snapshots extracts images; Superstars extracts the people, places, companies, teams, and organizations; Settings shows geographical distribution; Time shows how the universe has evolved over hours, days, months, and years. In the top left corner is a search box, which can be used to specify the scope of the current universe. The scope can be as broad as 2007, as recent as Today, as precise as Tobias on July 5th, 2007, or as open-ended as War, Climate Change or Happiness. The exact parameters of each universe are entirely up to the viewer, and unexpected paths unfold with exploration.

Universe does not suggest a single shared mythology. Instead, it provides a tool to explore many personal mythologies. Based on the chosen path of the viewer, Universe presents the most salient stories, statements and snapshots, as found in global news coverage from thousands of sources. Through this process of guided discovery, patterns start to emerge. Certain stories show up again and again, and they become our great sagas. Certain people start to shape the news, and they become our heroes and villains. Certain single words rise from the chatter, and they become our epic themes.

In Universe, as in reality, everything is connected. No event happens in isolation. No company exists in a vacuum. No person lives alone. Whereas news is often presented as a series of unrelated static events, Universe strives to show the broader narrative that contains those events. The only way to begin to see the mythic nature of today's world is to surface its connections, patterns, and themes. When this happens, we begin to see common threads — myths, really — twisting through the stream of information.
(tk)