Like some sort of hellish oracle that evokes Minority Report by way of Hasbro, the art installation T,E.D. (Transformations, Emotional Deconstruction) corrals the inchoate hive mind of the internet and uses eighty yammering ursine dolls as a mouthpiece.


This piece by Sean Hathaway and Carlos Severe Marcelin takes Teddy Ruxpin — that famous 1980s talking toy — and wires him up with the "instantaneous emotional pulse of the internet." Poor Teddy has seemingly gone loopy gazing into the whole of the human psyche. From the artists' synopsis:

TED is a large, wall-based installation consisting of an array of 80 Teddy Ruxpin dolls that speak emotional content gathered from the web via synthetic speech with animated mouths. The speaking of the emotional content is accompanied by one of twenty-four musical vignettes that have been paired to the emotional content being spoken. Each vignette, representing one of twenty-four subtle variants of human emotion, have been composed in such a way that the beginnings and ends of the short pieces will seamlessly dogleg in any possible configuration and stream endlessly as a unified whole. The installation is allowed to drift about freely through the emotional landscape being driven only by those who are contributing content to the piece whether unwittingly or consciously. As such the overall presentation of the piece can vary greatly based on external conditions such as seasons, world events and even time of day.


You can read more about T,E.D. at Severed Enterprises. [Via Make]