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‘Generating Utopia’ Creates Beautiful Foursquare Topography


September 12, 2013 | Andy Cush

Generating Utopia, by German developer Stefan Wagner, takes Foursquare location data as input, then maps your most-visited (or most-broadcasted, to be precise) locations onto the topography of an area. It’s a bit like these topographical maps of NYC’s wealth, but way prettier and with money swapped out for total oversharing.

Wagner had this to say about the project:

Although current discussions might indicate otherwise, the pictures we draw of ourselves within todays’ social media channels are no reliable representations of who we are in real life. We select what others get to see from our reality, and mostly, we share and publicly like only what considerably leaves a good impression on the rest of the world. We build an utopia, telling the story of what we think our lives should look like. This conclusion is all the more inspiring, regarding the fact that social networks begin to expand into physical space: we’re not only telling what we are up to, but also where we are.

Watch a video of Generating Utopia in action above.