Citizens measured through likes and followers

The Great Leader is a speculative concept seeking to investigate and unravel some of the dynamics of modern digital society. The notion of fake news is becoming more prominent in society today. Transparency is decreasing, while untrust in leaders is increasing. The use of Social media as channels for official information is slowly becoming the norm for most government institutions around the world. In a sense, citizen participation are being measured in likes and followers. 

An immitation of real life
The Great Leader is a digital representation of a fictional dictator ruling over a fictional totalitarian regime.

The Great Leader uses twitter as his central communication platform for his country. Every day he posts news about the condition of the nation.

His statements are possitive statements, based on negative news. These could be traffic deaths, stormy weather and rising pollution levels.

The Great Leader is an immitation, and should be seen as a social commentary of real life leaders.
The symbolism of The Great Leader were deliberately made to clearly resemble the swastika of Nazi Germany to make clear connotations to something evil and bad.

You can see The Great Leader and read some of his statements here: https://twitter.com/TheGreatLeadr 

Interplay of many diciplines

The Great Leader is essentially a twitter bot which transforms bad news to good news, displays it as a official statement and posts it on twitter.

The Great Leader is the result of several months of ideation and collaboration. Many different disciplines is represented in the final concept.

The graphical designlanguage had to be uniform and official looking. The Great Leader had to seem both passionate and menacing.

The system itself is an interplay between a Node.JS server, Twitter API, P5.JS, SHELL scripts and many libraries and API's.

To structure and communicate the program, we used flowcharts and held weekly meetings updating the team members of bugs and the current tasks at hand.

Finally, for the release of the concept, we conducted a presentation and made a conceptvideo.
A picture illustrating the original data and the altered official statement, posted by The Great Leader on Twitter.
This is an example of how the official statement (Left Frame) turned out based on the real bad news (Right frame).

Responsible for software structure

The overall concept was concived jointly between all the teammembers. My primary contribution was programmer of the central softwarestructure of the system. I worked with the NODE.JS server, and built the communication between the statement generation program, the API's and the twitter bot itself.

Furthermore, co-created the conceptvideo with one of the other team members.

A team of experimentation and fun

A photoshopped picture of the group, made to look like the team from Star Trek.
Our team consisted of the following five members, from left to right: Philip Fisker, Kevin Tonning, Sylvester Schelde, Casper Lerche & Marcus Due Jensen.
Key Roles in the project:
  • Concept ideation

  • NODE.js Developer

  • Software Structure design

  • Video production

  • Communication between Database, API's & Twitter Bot
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