Background

One of the things I have noticed from moving from the heart of the south, Alabama, to a more northern city like Pittsburgh is that people behave differently when interacting with stranger. The phenomenon is especially evident in public spaces, such as elevators or buses. With that in mind, I’ve decided to focus on the effects that different geographical locations can have on people’s attitudes, specifically when interacting with people they do not know. The data would be collected by taking pictures of people interacting with strangers and then complied so that the pictures of people from a certain region were laid one on top of the other, until a single, general but fuzzy picture was created for each region. The idea was inspired by the visual data pieces Jason Salavon created, but instead of showing the trends over time that he used in his pieces dealing with human photographs, my project would show trends over regions, similar to Salavon’s real estate prints.

The project will focus on three main data streams:

1. The region each person in the group is from (and whether that does or does not make them part of the group)

2. The general fuzziness of the overall picture (how different is the body attitude of each individual person in the group)

3. The overall facial expressions and posture of the group of people (smiling, slumped, hand gestures, etc.)