Watch These Animated Mountains Read Your Inane Tweets

The internet and I discovered a strange little world today, the Mountains of Mouthness. It's a website hosting an interactive 3D graphic that consists of two animated mountains loudly reciting tweets sent either with to handle @momountains or with the hashtag #mouthness. It's strange, soothing, and satisfying in a way I can't quite explain, and I wanted to find out what the deal was. So I asked the guy who made it.

Magnus Östergren—the creative director at Swedish graphics software company Goo Create— created the site using WebGL, a kind of JavaScript API. I reached him via email.

Hey Magnus! So can you tell us who you are and what you do?
I'm Magnus, a most definitely Swedish creative director mainly focused on direction and concept design for film, interactive experiments, and software development. At the moment I work with Goo Technologies to develop feature concepts, designs and stratagems for Html5/WebGL creation tool Goo Create as well as travelling around showing it to people. I also have a wienerdog who goes by the name Van Helsing.

How does Mountains of Mouthness work?
The Mountains of Mouthness is a WebGL/Html5 experience featuring MONT-EIN and MONT-DEUX, two friendly mountains loudly reciting tweets from around the world. The users can tweet to the mountains using certain hashtags or mentions and have it read back to them in realtime and can also visit this world by using a smartphone to have a 360 degree VR experience as one of the villagers living below the mountains.

What was your inspiration?
This comes from an idea I've had very long for a kids story about a village between two mountains madly in love with each other. They could never shut up about it and the villagers went deaf rather than move as the vibe was so super-awesome around the mountains. The story continues from there but I will not tell you any more of it.

How long did it take to build?
Three weeks. I had the brilliant design team at Goo Technologies build everything from my sketches and descriptions and building and coding the whole thing in time for the F5 festival (Arranged by Motionographer) in NYC 17-18th of April.

You've called it an "experiment." What exactly are you experimenting on?
There's more than one answer to that one. First: I wanted to see if people would find it fun to interact with my mountains of course. Second: to see how close to realtime we could make these giants talk when people tweeted at them. Third: If we could create the whole thing in our Html5/WebGL creation tool Goo Create.

What's your relationship like with Twitter in general? Are you on it a lot?
I do not use Twitter. I try but fail every time I enter. But what I like with it from the outside is the amount of stupid shit people actually think other people are interested in reading. I thought it [would be] fun to tap into that and let my mountains recite all of it. Any surprising results so far?
Yes! People fucking love it! And they really interact with the mountains, even complaining how they can't stop tweeting stupid shit to them. It warms my heart. Also, more than one person has said they resemble two giant green boobs. I laughed.