Status Qu(o|a)ntity explores the commodification of people as "friends" on Facebook, critiquing the notion of friendship as it relates to one's stratum within the social hierarchy.
about the project:
As a result of the ever-increasing presence of social networking applications, there have been many artists who have made works focusing primarily on the vulnerability/surveillance aspect such as the notion of voyeurism inherent in these technologies. However, we're now at a point where, despite these artists' attempts to the contrary, people have conformed to the usage of them and subsequently accepted the new communicative languages associated with them.
One of these such languages is the development of a virtual social heirarchy as can be best demonstrated with Facebook. The culture that has developed in this environment seems obsessed with the quantification of people as "friends", which has led to a compulsiveness regarding attainment of people to call one's friends.
This piece focuses on that commodification of people by showing in quantitative terms how many friends one has, and essentially modelling an individual's own social network in this respect. People who actually use facebook for communication rather than simply gaining popularity rise upwards and pull you up with them, however those who don't communicate as frequently appear below the user, effectively leeching off their relative popularity.
technical description
When one visits the live site, they are automatically redirected to a variation of the Facebook login screen, where they enter their email and password. From there, Facebook redirects the user back to the first page which, now authenticated, compiles an xml file of the user's friends as well as some statistics such as the number of posts on each person's wall. Their images are also saved to the local server to allow them to be loaded in-browser by the Processing sketch. The sketch is then loaded to allow the user to explore their 'friends'.
influences
While trying to get around Facebook's non-existing Java library, I stumbled upon a project by Steven Bulhoes in the Processing discourse that was technically similar and he was kind enough to point me in the direction of using a PHP proxy, which also resolved the issue of running it in-browser.
