The piece that struck me the most was how We Feel Fine and Listening Post managed to turn cold, impersonal data into something that felt strangely alive and deeply human. We Feel Fine pulled me into a swirling mass of emotions, each one plucked from the online confessions of strangers—moments of joy, heartbreak, hope, and loneliness, all there for me to explore. At first, it felt like a secret window into the soul of the internet, but as I clicked and scrolled, I started to wonder whether the act of cataloging these feelings stripped away some of their meaning, turning them into nothing more than colorful dots on a screen, something to look at but not quite touch. The connection it offered felt fragile, as if it could dissolve the moment I looked too closely, leaving me questioning whether human emotions really belong in the rigid structures of data.

Listening Post, on the other hand, didn’t try to offer meaning or connection—it gave me chaos. Standing in front of its glowing screens, watching snippets of live internet chatter flash before my eyes while robotic voices read them aloud, I felt like I was sinking into the noise of the digital world, the same noise that surrounds me every day but made visible, made impossible to ignore. There was no tidy narrative, no promise of understanding; it was just a flood of disjointed, fleeting thoughts, some mundane, some profound, all overlapping in a way that felt overwhelming yet honest. And while I stood there, trying to make sense of it all, I realized that maybe this was the point: to confront the sheer volume of our digital lives, to sit with the mess and accept that not everything is meant to be understood.

Both works stayed with me long after I left, lingering like questions I couldn’t quite answer. They made me think about the systems we rely on to organize our world, systems that feel so clean and efficient but often hide the messy realities underneath. How much do we give up when we trust data to tell us who we are, and how much of ourselves do we lose when we try to fit into its tidy categories? Maybe it’s not about rejecting data entirely, but about remembering that it’s never the full picture, never the final answer—it’s only what we choose to make of it.