A Virtual Revolution

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In Georges Seurat’s 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 Barbara’s Department 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 — she’s 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 that’s 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 it’s 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. “It’s shaped according to the data we’ve 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 UCSB Academic Senate Faculty Research Grant, was fueled by 60,000 users who tweeted roughly half a million posts during the Women’s March in January. Developed with the help of her two graduate lab ...

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