The Dumpster, 2006

The Dumpster is the first in a series of three works co-commissioned in collaboration with Tate Online. Critical texts and video interviews with the artists will accompany the works at

The Dumpster is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has "dumped" another. The project's graphical tools reveal the astonishing similarities, unique differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships, providing both peculiarly analytic and sympathetically intimate perspectives onto the diversity of global romantic pain.

Please note: The Dumpster requires the Java browser plug-in, and includes a 450kB download (perhaps 2 minutes on a 28.8k modem).



Text: Lev Manovich, Social Data Browsing

Golan Levin's work combines equal measures of the whimsical, the provocative, and the sublime in a wide variety of online, installation and performance media. He teaches electronic art at Carnegie Mellon University and is represented by bitforms gallery, New York.

Kamal Nigam has expertise in data mining and machine learning, with an emphasis on analyzing text and internet data. Until recently Kamal was the Director of Applied Research at Intelliseek, and is now at the new Google engineering office in Pittsburgh.

Jonathan Feinberg takes pride in executing the invisible-yet-essential. He works in the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a drummer he has worked with such bands as They Might Be Giants, Lisa Loeb, and Church of Betty.