In this post we'll highlight six incredible experimental art projects that are using Twitter as a basis for their awesome creations. These visualizations go beyond just displaying data in more interesting ways -- they are also truly fascinating pieces of online art.
1. Portwiture
Portwiture is an absolutely beautiful Twitter/Flickr mashup project that takes your tweets and turns them into a gorgeous piece of mosaic tile art. The site works by taking a look at your most recent tweets, and pulling out your most used keywords. Using those keywords, Portwiture then matches your tweets to interesting photography from Flickr to create a "serendipitous visual representation of your Twitter profile." The results are stunning and can be viewed both in mosaic mode, and as a slideshow.
You can tweet the results by changing the number of keywords to use, how it searches Flickr (i.e., by interestingness or by relevance), and by restricting the Flickr results to a specific Flickr user (so you can make a mosaic of your own photos).
Twitter Mosaic also creates a beautiful mosaic image from your Twitter profile, but rather than pulling images from Flickr and matching them to the content of your tweets, the site instead tiles the profile images of your followers (or friends). The result is another amazing piece of Twitter-powered artwork. The site lets you delete from the mosaic any followers you want -- allowing you to remove default avatars and reconfigure the mosaic until you have the most attractive possible version.
The resulting image can be embedded on your web page or purchased on merchandise like coffee mugs or t-shirts.
3. TimeTweets
TimeTweets is an infinitely clever Twitter mashup that turns tweets into a clock. The site searches for tweets with a number corresponding to either the hour, minute, or second and then places those tweets into a clock by accentuating the numbers. The result is a very readable clock that is accurate to the second and refreshes in real-time with new tweets (though sometimes a second or two may be skipped if there are no good tweets that match the necessary number). The site is also available as a screensaver for the Mac.
Twitterfountain takes text and photos and puts them together to create a piece of continually updating art. The site is another Twitter/Flickr mashup that mixes tweets and Flickr images about specific keywords. You can set the keywords for both the Twitter and Flickr searches, and they don't have to match (so you could mix tweets about puppies with pictures of kittens). The result is a really cool way to visualize tweets about specific topics or events with images that match.
Twitterfountains can be embedded and the size, color, and keywords for both Twitter and Flickr can be customized.
5. Twistori
Twistori is an absolutely dazzling Twitter art project that continually scrolls tweets using the words love, hate, think, believe, feel, or wish. The site offers a fascinating look into the psyche of the collective Twitterverse, but because of the understated beauty of its design, Twistori can also be considered a top-notch Twitter-powered art project.
Mac users can download a screensaver version of Twistori, as well as a desktop app that can create your own custom Twistori visualizations based on whatever keywords you want (and in whichever colors or fonts you'd like to use).
6. Twyric
By mashing up Twitter with Flickr (sense a theme?), Twyric is able to bring life to short, Twitter-published verse. The site pulls in tweets that include poetic hashtags such as #haiku, #twyric, #lyric, #poetry, #poetic, and #poem, among others. The site then pairs the contents of that tweet with a related (by keyword, at least) image from Flickr. In mashing up those two, Twyric manages to create short, but beautiful, one-line visual poems. The creators of the experimental art project say that the idea is to create a "background for contemplation."
Do you know of any other Twitter-powered art projects? Please let us know about them in the comments!
More Twitter resources from Mashable:
- 6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations
- 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates