To some, fake news may be a tweet, a Facebook post or a url on the dark web.
To Northeastern University professor Albert-László Barabási and students in the Barabási lab, fake news is hundreds of small spheres bubbling up across the walls of a darkened room, in reds, oranges, then blues and pinks, while unintelligible whispers grow louder and morph with the sound of a dripping faucet.
“It’s an animation of how (conveyors of fake news) are actually sending their messages out, and how they are effectively infecting the social network behind Twitter with their messaging,” explains Barabási, the Robert Gray Dodge professor of network science and a distinguished university professor of physics at Northeastern. “Art and the language and the medium of art offer us a way to engage with this data in a way that is different from what we normally do.”
This month, Barabási and students displayed four pieces as part of an exhibit at Harvard’s CAMLab in Cambridge. The other pieces on display in the exhibit, interestingly, were created by Kim Albrecht, a former student in Barabási’s lab who is now a professor of information design at a university in Germany.
Read more at Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
