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        <h1 class="heading">References</h1>

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        <br><br><br><br><b>Reflections on participation and privacy from We Feel Fine</b><br><br>
The main and core inspiration for Beyond Words is the net art project We Feel Fine (www.wefeelfine.org) by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. The project scours the internet in search for blog posts containing the key phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”, aggregates this information and then transforms it into an artistic visual representation. The work bears many similarities with ours, there are however a few crucial artistic decisions on our side which differentiate our project.<br><br>
Transitioning from this inspiration, Beyond Words takes a different approach. It invites users to voluntarily contribute their confessions into the artwork, while We Feel Fine automatically aggregates data already posted across the web. Our digital installation gives the participants a feeling of <b>agency</b> in contributing to the work, rather than having the data taken from them without their consent. The participant contributes their emotional state through their <b>interaction</b> with the interface of the installation, rather than passively having them collected without knowledge. Building on this concept, the release of an emotion to the digital universe is an act of <b>cocreation</b>, giving each participant a sense of authorship over the final work. It is also a symbolic, cathartic act. Behind each star, there is a person, a story, and a confession – even if said confession is electronically mediated.<br><br>
Importantly, the confession is facilitated with <b>anonymity</b> in mind. Unlike WFH, which collected the gender, age, location, and in many cases pictures of its participants. None of this is included in Beyond Words, as the project is not interested in identifying or profiling the authors of submissions. This is a conscious design decision in order to make the participants more comfortable in sharing their stories, as intimate as they can be.<br><br>
An important aspect of our work is creating an <b>experience</b> for our participants in exchange for their contribution. The galaxy of Beyond Words is deliberately only accessible to people who contribute. We invite the cocreators work to have the chance to experience it, as a token of gratitude for their input. We noted that this was not the case for the people, whose personal statements were fed to the 2006 installation, at least not by design. The two project establish a different relationship, or agreement, with their participants and audience. For us, they are one and the same, and the journey of each participant starts from the star which they created.<br><br>
Reflecting on the legacy of We Feel Fine, it is evident that with over 12 million emotions on record, it is a true testament to human diversity, to the richness of human experience across the world and online. However, almost 20 years later, in a changed internet landscape, the same project reads different. The project was launched at a time when data analysis was beginning to take pace. Since its launch, the web has transformed significantly. First, it has grown more personal through the social media boom, then even more so through targeted advertising, finally leading to data privacy scandals such as Cambridge Analytica and the legislative countermeasures like the GDPR. In retrospect, WFF precipitates the Internet’s capability to harvest and process the most intimate details of human experience. It is in essence one of various data mining agents, and like all aggregators, it reduces the published content into the information that is deemed useful for its purpose. The immediate purpose may be artistic, but it is important to recognise that in a capitalist reality, art is not immune to commercial interests. The book “We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion”, released in 2009, proves the point.<br><br>
In contrast to this trend, the direction for Beyond Words is to escape from the globally surveilled internet into a simpler time, when it was viewed as a place where everyone can open up in full anonymity. We know well that a netizen in 2023 may be wary of sharing their data to a random source, and we ask them to submit nothing but two pieces of information:<br><br>
How do you feel?<br><br>
and<br><br>
What is the reason of that?<br><br><br><br>
<b>Lessons from PostSecret on moderation of user-submitted content</b><br><br>
PostSecret was originally a small community art project back in 2005. Its author, Frank Warren handed out self-addressed postcards, inviting local people to anonymously share “artful” secrets that they had never told anyone before. The initiative was more successful than he could ever envisage, and countless secrets started coming in from across the world. The project soon entered the internet, first as a blog on Blogger, then a dedicated website (www.postsecret.com), and eventually an app. PS has been a global phenomenon, yet it has not been free of controversies, particularly the app, which had to be taken down a few months following its launch. Its history is a worthwhile lesson for Beyond Words.<br><br>
Both projects deal with personal content submitted directly by participants. Unlike the PS blog, which regularly posts a small portion of selected secrets, the notorious PS app allowed its users the freedom to post their secrets to the database, all of which could be immediately accessible to the public. The application experienced an extremely high volume of submissions (over two million), including “content that was not just pornographic but also gruesome and at times threatening”. Said content represented only 1% of all submissions, yet the overall volume made it impossible for the team of volunteer moderators working around the clock to remove offensive content in a timely fashion. The interface allowed users to post pictures, meaning that the userbase was exposed to pornographic imagery. All this resulted in complaints from users, the intervention of Apple, law enforcement and FBI.<br><br>
In Beyond Words, the risk of graphic offensive content is averted by limiting user input to text. However, there are other potential issues which our team needs to consider, should the project go public. The users may post:<br><br>
– content which is racist, homo- or transphobic, misogynistic, xenophobic, etc;<br>
– content that contains contact details or other personally identifiable information, whether their own or other people’s;<br>
– threats directed at individuals or groups – bullying or harassment;<br>
– content which ignores the instructions (doesn’t contain feelings and reasons);<br>
– content with suicidal ideation or self-harm;<br>
– spam or promotional content;<br>
– content with misinformation or conspiracy theories;<br>
– violent or graphic descriptions;<br>
– hate speech;<br>
– content extremist views;<br>
– sensitive and triggering topics;<br>
– libel, defamation;<br>
– content which encourages illegal activities.<br><br>
From the practical perspective, AI could help in content moderation, reducing the workload for human moderators. Even so, however, guidelines for moderation need to be established. The degree of moderation needs to be delineated – as with any art project, there is the temptation to allow the contributors complete artistic freedom. Such freedom, however, can cause harm and bring about legal repercussions. Once it has been agreed that the content should be moderated, there comes the additional challenge of where exactly to draw the line. Some of the above-mentioned points are more ambiguous than others. For instance, should a participant be prevented from describing their suicidal ideation if it is known that this can trigger suicidal behaviour in some participants?<br><br>
Content moderation is not limited to censoring submissions, but also entails a sense of responsibility towards participants. If a user were to post a submission in which they are declaring their intention to commit suicide, how should the team act? How should the website react to the user declaring that they have committed a felony?<br><br>
The above considerations are not simply a matter of avoiding legal problems. The intention of Beyond Words is to create a platform where users can feel safe to be vulnerable and express their deepest emotions. This objective calls for a delicate balance between the freedom of expression and creating a protected environment. Our aim is to foster respect, empathy, and support, and the moderation system should both be sensitive to the nuances of human experience and also guard against content that could undermine the above principles.<br><br>
We want our galaxy to be a habitable space for human emotions.
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