Bluebird in a Fir Tree

About Bluebird in a Fir Tree

Bluebird is an interactive, retro visualisation of a low-fi Christmas tree, created from live tweets about Christmas.

It uses a 1980’s aesthetic and a live integration with Twitter to question what an idealised Christmas means in 2016.

The artwork is now non-function, as Twitter became X and the API access was revoked.

How Bluebird in a Fir Tree was made

The piece is created using a Raspberry Pi (3), Processing, an interactive touchscreen and a custom PHP script to retrieve, clean and distributed the tweets from Twitter’s API.

Media

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History

Bluebird was created as a bespoke piece for the Cupola Gallery exhibition: “To please a few“, as part of an annual Christmas exhibition.