How to maintain personal connections in an age that relies on accelerated connectedness with people we don’t know, through technology, is the theme of a timely exhibition that opened last Thursday night at Pace/MacGill Gallery in Chelsea. Curated by three faculty members in the School of Visual Arts MFA Photography, Video and Related Media department—Adam Bell, Seth Lambert, and Michelle Leftheris—the show explores expression in art, the emotional landscape of the internet, and sentiment analysis, among other subjects.

Images from We Feel Fine, an exploration of human emotion by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. Copyright the artists, courtesy School of Visual Arts.

In his installation Democracy in Action, author, artist, musician, and former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne displays 20 digital photo frames, each shuffling images pulled from the Internet of various parliamentarians arguing and wrestling with one another.

Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher debut Assignment #68 Feel the News—part of their collaboration “Learning To Love You More”—which is a collection of photos taken by participants that were asked to watch a segment from democracynow.org, pick someone from the news that had left on impression on them, and then document themselves imagining and acting out a moment of that person’s day.

In an interview prior to the opening, July said that she has a hard time keeping up with the news because “the scale of what interests me is more intimate and personal than what is reported in the news. So I thought it would be interesting to see what it felt like to be someone who is in the public eye.”

A collaboration between Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar entitled We Feel Fine extracts the phrases “I feel” or “I am feeling” from recent blog posts in an attempt to measure the world’s “emotional temperature.”

Christopher Baker examines the prevalence of micro-messaging technologies through his piece Murmur Study. Using software he developed that is designed to pull live status updates from Twitter containing variations of terms like “argh” and “meh,” 20 thermal printers mounted to the gallery wall spew out the data allowing the accumulation to be visually measured and pondered.

Other artists featured in the show are Aram Bartholl, Robert Heinecken and Penelope Umbrico.

Social Media continues through October 15 at Pace/MacGill Gallery, 510 West 25 Street, NY, NY.