The Dumpster
The Dumpster was created by Golan Levin, Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg and made possible by support from the Whitney Artport, the Tate Online, and Intelliseek. Version 1.0 of the Dumpster was built in Processing and launched on Valentine’s day, 2006: an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers.
Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has “dumped” another. The project’s graphical tools reveal the astonishing similarities, unique differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships, providing both peculiarly analytic and sympathetically intimate perspectives onto the diversity of global romantic pain.
The Dumpster visualizes a fixed collection of 20,000 romantic breakups that occurred during 2005. These breakups were obtained from web logs (“blogs”) posted by people on the Internet. At least half of the authors of these breakups were American teenagers between the ages of 13 and 19.
