During the Web 1.0 Conference, I was hanging out with Amber Case and we were both sharing our mutual love of the Pokemon Fusion project, where someone crossed every pokemon's face with every other pokemon's body, resulting in ridiculous creations.
I noticed while looking through some of the pokemon with Amber that it would be nice if I could explore a larger space of the combinations ("I want to see more fusions with this face") instead of just seeing one at a time. Since there's a principle in my research lab of "see all the things" and because I thought it would be hilarious (mostly because I thought it would be hilarious), I decided to make a poster of all possible cominbations of pokemon faces and bodies, 22,801 in total (151 squared).
I made a really big canvas in a web browser and wrote all the images the original fusion author had pre-made to that canvas in a big matrix. The columns are the body of a pokemon and the rows are the colors and faces of all other pokemon:
I spent about three days printing the poster, (printing only a page at a time using the physical USB cable ended up being key) but it finally finished and it was ridiculous:
Basically the only way to interact with this thing is to crawl around on it, which is pretty fun.
Emily and I spent some time putting little post-its on our favorite ones as signals for other people looking at it. During that session, we found that it was nice to crawl down a column of bodies until you got to a funny face, then follow that row for a while to see where it lead. That was an interesting interaction.
Another interesting thing is that people seem to be totally overwhelmed when they look at it! Few people look very close at the poster, and fewer still get excited and start exploring. Part of why this happens may be that the people I've shown it to aren't that interested in pokemon (I think I'm right on the edge of a generational gap). Another reason is that there's just too much stuff! I think a few people have suggested a kind of magnifying glass or way of calling out a single fusion so people can get a better look from a distance. Having some larger landmarks and visual differentiation does seem like it would be helpful.
Unfortunately the poster is 12.5x12.5 feet so it takes up a lot of floor space. Not long after I made it someone moved most of it because it was interfering with another demo. I think I'm going to lay it out again during an Adventure Time party on December 4 to see what happens with a larger number of people.