We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I am feeling.’ When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the ‘feeling’ expressed in that sentence (sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved, resulting in a database of human feelings that increases by 15,000—20,000 new feelings per day.

Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can then be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties (color, size, shape, opacity) indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph that it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of data-based axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion, which We Feel Fine then paints in six formal movements: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s on our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and that it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

Note: Since Java applets are no longer readily supported in web browsers, I'm making the We Feel Fine desktop application available for download in three different formats: Apple Silicon, Apple Intel, and Windows Intel. For advice on getting the application to run on a Mac, please see these Processing tech notes — basically, right-click on the application icon and select "Open". Good luck!