99 red balloons
Futureme is a web service that allows you to write a letter (email) to yourself that gets delivered at a later date. they currently host nearly 400,000 letters, about 30,000 of which are public. by writing a letter to your future self you might, for example, remind yourself of something you are scared of forgetting. or perhaps, you might remind yourself of something you are trying to forget and you want to check on your progress. Some sample emails:
subject: hello, future (Dec 20, 2002, sent Mon Mar 1, 2004)
where is saddam hussein now?
subject: am i a loser? (Dec 24, 2002, to be delivered Jan 1, 2010)
do i still live at home?
subject: drinking causes embarrasment (Sep 14, 2003, sent Sep 14, 2004)
Dear FutureMe,
If you forgot, let me remind you, you got really drunk this weekend, at a crappy psuedo-hip lounge bar in Wellington, you said some unfortunate things, to a big client, and you might get fired tomorrow.
moral of the story, you need a girlfriend to keep you out of trouble. so by the time you get this, I want to hear about the smart funny attractive girl, who kept you from making an ass out of yourself.
Love,
you (me)
From these 30,000 emails, we (a team of UCLA students) selected the ones in which terms like remember, remind, forget and forgot were highly recurrent. We ended up with about 7,000 emails. Some interesting excerpts:
i hope you remember that you were happy. drunk, but happy.
remember: life is a waste of time, time is a waste of life, get wasted all the time, and have the time of your life.
remember not to sell out - stay an atheist!
have conversations that you’ll never forget.
dont forget to brush your teeth.
remember the underwear discussions.
i love you. don’t forget to love me.
We used this data to perform a live visualization of the mood towards the future, extracted from the futureme emails. The installation was up for a day on Tuesday (June 12, 2007) outside the Design|Media Broad Art Center at UCLA. The visualization was performed using data from all the available 7,000 emails. Emails were sorted by time lag (the time between authoring and delivery of the email) and divided in 99 batches. For each batch, the general “mood” was computed based on the recurrence of selected keywords. Color was used to represent mood: four shades of air balloons, from light pink (sadder) to dark red (happier). The balloons were hanged from the 4th floor of the Broad Art Center creating a histogram-like pattern, one that would (supposedly) represent time lag across space.
The whole idea behind the project was to capture manifestations of remembering|forgetting contained in the emails, so for every batch of balloons (i.e. time lag) a representative textual email snippet was also presented. For example: 
Lots of photos of the installation can be found at my flickr page as well as esa’s and tommy’s. The entire project was ephemeral, so it was meant to be destroyed and… forgotten. Balloons went down by noon:
and we then popped all of them in a matter of few minutes:
N.B. I used the same dataset to perform a more quantitative study of the public collective perception of the future.
Sun 24 Jun
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