tracking

oCat

Real Time tracking of Cat related Online Activity

oCat continuously monitors cat related online activity. Using Google’s YouTube API, a server collects data concerning popular and new cat videos. A device (The oCat News Distractor), a Twitter bot (@ocatkitty) and a website (ocat.co) use this data to generate a data visualization and tweets and to display videos. The aim of the project is to both increase and reveal the amount of time people spend on watching cat videos.




The oCat News Distractor visualizes the amount of new cat video views. It monitors the 25 most popular cat videos, counts their views and stamps a paw print on a timeline every 1000 new video views. The timeline consists of current news collected from various RSS feeds. Every minute a thermal printer prints a new section containing a timestamp, source and headline. An LCD-screen on the device displays the current number of views the 25 most popular cat videos have collected since midnight.




The Twitter bot, Kitty o’Cat (@ocatkitty), unremittingly tweets about cat videos and the website ocat.co provides a platform to binge watch random popular or new cat videos.




You can also find this project on:  and digitalmedia-bremen.de.




Info

Year:  2016
Duration:  7 months
(independent with support by a programmer for php)
Category:  Media Art / Data Visualization / Programmming
Context:  Design Pop seminar HfK Bremen (Prof. Dennis Paul)

Exhibitions: 
Press: 
Keywords (EN): Cat, cat videos, twitter, youtube, social media, news, gossip, visualization, critique, behavior, api, python, thermal printer.
Keywords (DE): Katze, Katzenvideos, Twitter, YouTube, soziale Medien, Nachrichten, Klatsch, Visualisierung, Kritik, Verhalten, API, Python, Kassenbon Drucker.