Markus Kison

pulse. D-2008.

Markus Kison is a digital artist based in Berlin. By misusing data material he is discussing social contexts. These emerge from the relationship between physical objects and their inherent digital information layers. At present Kison is researching on the role of the contemporary human being in a digital augmented world. He has exhibited in various museums worldwide, received international awards and given talks at art and design conferences. See more;

Versus

Versus continuously selects a pair of participants from the Personal Genome Project (PGP) and compares their genes by superimposing them on top of one another. Letters which can be deciphered in the two-sided projection represent identical genome base-pairs that both participants have: A – adenine, c – cytosine, G – guanine, T – thymine, n – so-called “junk DNA” or large areas that do not encode to proteins.

The PGP aims to share the DNA sequence of 100,000 volunteers with the general public over the Internet. In addition the full name of the participant, his or her medical history as well as other personal information is published.

Pulse

Pulse is a live-visualization of recent emotional expressions, written on private weblog communities like blogger.com. Weblog entries are compared to a list of emotions, which refers to Robert Plutchik’s seminal book Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion published in 1980. Plutchik describes eight basic human emotions in his book: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. He developed a diagram in which these eight emotions, together with their weakened and amplified counterparts, form a three dimensional cone, consisting of 24 areas. The cone is the basic form of pulse, which can enlarge in the 24 directions of the different emotions. Each time an emotion tag, or a synonym of it, is found in a recent blog entry, the shape-shifting object transforms itself in such a way that the new volume represents a piece of the overall current emotional condition of surfers on the Internet.