Twipology is a landscape formed from a 4×3 grid of hashpatches, each one of them representing a particular hashtag. Each hashpatch in turn is composed of 10×10 twips, these being a materialized meshed representation of a relevant tweet for that hashtag. The shape of each twip is defined by a combination of word count, length, links and hashtags. In an abstract sense, the more intricate the geometry of the twip, the richer the information and relations in that twip are. This landscape has an overlaid network of paths and sitting spaces for the public to immerse in it.

Twipology is a static representation of a global conversation happening across time and space on Twitter. It dynamically evolves as agents join and drop the conversation, and as the audience turns their attention around to different forums. Our exhibit materialized a split second of this conversation happening Sat, 07 Mar 2015 18:58:34 GMT, listening to the following hashtags:

#whatever
#surface
#control
#system
#radical
#passage
#cigarette
#pink
#abstract
#raw
#superficial
#kindergarten

Twipology was a collaboration between Jöelle, who was the brain behind the project, Kevin Hinz  who led the material fabrication, and myself, who took care of the computational backbone. I developed a series of Node.js scripts to query Twitter’s API for relevant tweets containing specific hashtags, and a set of C# scripts running under Grasshopper for Rhinoceros to create the mesh representations of these twips. This code is open-source and can be found on https://github.com/garciadelcastillo/twipology

We would also like to acknowledge Nic Shackle and Paul Mesarcik from Thingking for their early contribution to the project.

Photos copyright of Jake Rudin and myself.