A result of a two-year collaboration with New York-based Sputnik, Inc., an organization that documents contemporary culture through intimate video interviews with hundreds of leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology, covering a wide range of topics.

The central premise of the Sputnik project is that everything is connected to everything else, and that topics and ideas that may seem fringe and even heretical to the mainstream world are in fact being investigated by leading thinkers working in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, biology, economics, architecture, digital art, video games, computer science and music. Sputnik is dedicated to bringing these crucial ideas from the fringes of thought out into the limelight, so that the world can begin to understand them.

Conducted over more than ten years and previously unavailable to the public, the interviews within the site chronicle some of the most provocative human ideas to have emerged in the last few decades. The site itself aims to highlight the interconnections between seemingly disparate thinkers and ideas, using a simple navigational system with no dead ends, where every thought leads to another thought, akin to swimming the stream of consciousness.

There are about 200 videos on the site today, and there will be thousands more added over the coming weeks, months, and years.

Check out a sample video by Jonathan about Human Feelings:

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In his words:

Universe presents an interactive night sky, composed of thousands of twinkling stars, which then connect to form constellations. Each of these constellations has a specific counterpart in the physical world — a story, a person, a quote, an image, a company, a nation, a mythic theme. Any constellation can be clicked, making it the center of the universe, and causing all other stars to enter its orbit. Universe is infinitely large, and each person’s path through it will be different. For an explanation of how it works, read “Stages”. For a longer discussion of the ideas behind the piece, read “Statement”.
Jonathan Harris

This is what an Israel search for people looks like..

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Born in 1979 in Vermont, he had artistic inclinations from the start, sketching and painting early on. He also collected and pasted bits of life as they passed him by, ticket stubs, dead insects and other items. This served as a good base for what he does today, on a grander scale.

Harris studies computer studies at Princeton. He currently resided in Brooklyn, New York. Over the past few years he has lectured at Princeton, Stanford, Parson’s school of Design and Google. He was featured on CNN, Reuters, BBC, The Guardian, USA Today, Voice of America Radio, Creative Review, and Wired.

These are some of his projects, described in his own words. Explore them, they’re worth it…
His site is called Number 27.

justcurio.us is an anonymous question and answer system, open to anyone, with one simple rule: to ask a question, you must first answer someone else’s question. Question yields answer yields question. Strangers helping strangers.

10×10 (‘ten by ten’) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.
10×10 is ever-changing, ever-growing, quietly observing the ways in which we live. It records our wars and crises, our triumphs and tragedies, our mistakes and milestones. When we make history, or at least the headlines, 10×10 takes note and remembers.

WordCount is an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked and scaled in order of commonness and arranged side by side as a very long sentence. Each word’s size reflects its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

Understanding Vorn is an artwork in flux. Every five minutes it scours thousands of weblogs, searching for the four most recently posted pictures that begin with the letters ‘V’, ‘O’, ‘R’, ‘N’. Every five minutes, Understanding Vorn changes, filled with fresh words and pictures from the blogosphere.

Oral Fixation is a designer breath mint company dedicated to making everyday objects beautiful. As one of its three founders, and its Creative Director, I take care of Oral Fixation’s identity design, product design, web design, and advertising. Attention to detail is the first thing you’ll notice when you hold an Oral Fixation tin for the first time. Each flavor follows a different theme — classical music, minimalist art, the Garden of Eden, the Free Tibet movement, and so on. These themes are explored in the tin illustrations, the wax paper inside the tins, the mint engravings, the double entendre slogans, and inside the 3D fantasy land of the website. Oral Fixation mints are an easy product to fall in love with, because the more you discover the hidden design motifs, the more you feel you’re in on a secret.

Sized perfectly to fit folded cash, credit cards, and other nighttime accoutrements, the tins double as reusable wallets for people who don’t like traveling with a bulge in their pockets. The web site is an epic fantasy-world unto itself, loosely based on Oral Fixation’s real world Chocolate Factory headquarters.

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