This is for a project about intimacy and digital media.
When I first considered intimacy and how it relates to digital media, I was thinking about private moments between two people. There were a few paths I had gone down that lead to fairly salacious insights including Mechanical Turk feedback related to the use of media and communications during lovemaking... There's probably some interesting data in there to extract, but I didn't want to dig much deeper into that territory.
It occurred to me that intimate (non-sexual) moments can be experienced alone and are usually meaningful. A time to be pensive, collected, and reflective. Sometimes those moments want to be shared. Twitter lets us intrude on the broadcasts of total strangers and the content of tweets ranges from lewd remarks to critical commentary and bits of wisdom (try http://twitter.com/johnmaeda for instance.)
It's a bit coarse, but the moments of solitude that rarely request company are in the bathroom and media often plays a role. The newspaper, a magazine, graffiti, and in the past decade, WiFi brings the information superhighway right to the throne. You can catch up on email, twitter, read the news, or any number of things.
This program (written in Processing.org and accessing the Twitter API and FreeTTS API) is intended to be installed in a bathroom. Kevin, the computer voice, scans the Twitter stream in real time and looks for tweets about the bathroom. He'll then read them out loud. Typical tweets are about embarrassment, apartment hunting, anxiety, office horrors, and awkward encounters.
The best part is that the author has no idea that his or her tweet is being broadcast to a captive audience.