Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Fujita Keisuke has made an installation that uses real-time tweets from people expressing suicidal thoughts to activate a motor-powered needle that scratches away at a monolithic block of carbon.
Presented at this year's Dutch Design Week, the Voltaic Realism installation offers as a visual representation of the emotions expressed in these Twitter posts, known as suicide tweets.

Keisuke began the project by studying the emotional impact of different methods of communication, from face-to-face conversations to letter-writing and social media posting.
He found an emotional disconnect between the words expressed online and the effect these posts had on users.
"Today, we live in a generation where a large amount of communication is done by digital signals such as e-mail, online chat and SMS. The information is instant and fast in this age of media saturation," the designer told Dezeen. "Twitter is flooded with people telling the world that they want to die. Yet, we do not feel the weight of the words on the screen," he continued. "They remain little more than flashing lights."

An algorithm was made to search for the suicide tweets, which were identified using pre-programmed verbal cues such as "I wanna die."
These were projected onto an electronic screen, which sent signals to a motor-powered needle that scratched away at the large chunk of solid carbon.
For each tweet, 0.0054 grams of carbon was ...