In Georges Seurats masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the artist used millions of dots of color to paint a scene of Parisians at a park along the banks of the River Seine. When it was exhibited for the first time in 1886, the technique known as pointillism was revolutionary and sparked a new artistic movement: Neo-Impressionism.

Today, 131 years later,Laila Shereen Sakr, an assistant professor in UC Santa BarbarasDepartment of Film and Media Studies, is using billions of social media posts to create a revolutionary work of art. Using a program she developed the R-Shief Media System, which has been collecting and analyzing social media posts since 2008 shes building a virtual reality (VR) world that gives form to those countless tweets.

How can we create a cinematic VR production out of these tweets? Sakr said. Can we make a VR production thats cinematic using real-time data? Social media in particular seemed very apt. We started thinking, What would that cinematic world look like?

In the 2018 Arab Future Tripping VR Prototype Sakr developed, that world looks like its from another universe. Her cyborg avatar VJ Um Amel video jockey mother of hope in Arabic moves through a landscape literally animated by tweets. Trees sprout from the ground, each one a virtual manifestation of an individual social media post.

The shape of the tree is not random, Sakr explained. Its shaped according to the data weve structured from our Twitter archive. I am approaching this world-building project using a mix of gaming, sculpture, design and cinematic production methodologies.

The VR prototype, which was funded with a UC Santa Barbara Academic Senate Faculty Research Grant, was fueled by 60,000 users who tweeted roughly half a million posts during the Womens March in January. Developed with the help of her two graduate lab assistants, Intae Hwang and Han-Wei Kung, the VR project is the culmination of Sakrs latest version of R-Shief. The software, she said, has collected some 30 billion tweets since 2008.

Ive got this crazy archive and I want people to be able to know whats in it, she said. So Im thinking of new modes of knowledge production given the digital form of social media data. How do we produce knowledge based on this primary source? And Im working my way through this universe knowing that Im just a tiny explorer on this ship. Its much bigger than I am; it is humbling.

Sakrs VR project comes on the 10thanniversary of creating VJ Um Amel, her digital alter ego. VJ Um Amel is a name I use in a set of art practices where I explore the implications of placing the identity ofmother and a techno-feminist construct of cyborg within local and transnational expressions of Arab, she writes inA VJ Manifesto.

To mark the decade, she will also release R-Shief 5.0 and publish a book on Arabic open-source software movement and its role in the Arab uprisings. When the VR project is complete Sakr wants to have an immersive space with multiple screens and projectors. She would also like to see it installed in galleries and museums as a traveling exhibit. In the meantime she faces the daunting task of scaling up the project to its full potential.

I want to use the entire database, she said. Right now Im just testing. What you see is only a hundred rows of data. It is just the conceptualizing part of the project. After this, we have to build the whole thing.

Watch a preview of the game below:

The rest is here:

A billion tweets turned into virtual reality - University of California