Simulation of the digital identity of the Netherlands is based on a research I did on micronations in the digital 'sisterplanet' of the Earth, called 'Micras'. Micras is a digital planet based on our planet Earth. Members of the Micras community can create their own country on the planet or can became a citizen of one of the already existing countries. Each country has its own online identity which is build on in real-life existing archetype, such as Place de la Concorde in Paris. 

I took one of the online micronations, the Empire of the Alexandrians, as a starting point for my simulation. The Empire of the Alexandrians (also known as Alexandria) uses a Napoleonic theme for their online identity and their political system. France under Napoleon's reign was the first constitutional monarchy, a system that has been used as an example for modern monarchies such as the Netherlands and Great Britain. Alexandria also uses a lot of France-based archetypes and even has a capital named after Geneve, called Geneva. Which is interesting because Switzerland is known as a neutral country.

I took all the archetypes and used their coordinates on Earth to create the shape in the corner bottom right. This shape also stands for a map of Geneva, with its different sections; the Business District, the Government District, the Church, the Entertainment District, the Recreation District, the Manifestation District and the Palace of Justice. These districts can also be found in reallife countries such as the Netherlands, espacially in the city of The Hague where our government is based. For each of those seven districts I found an The Hague-based archetype and made mosaics of them build from the 'Geneva'-shape. The buildings are placed based on the map I made of Geneva.

When I combined all those things a new identity for the Netherlands was starting to emerge and I started to think of a system of how I could show the current state in country was in online; what the trending topics are and how that effects the country. That was when I realised that the app would probably miss its target when it would only be published online. What if you would come home from your holiday or went on a holiday to the Netherlands, landed on Schiphol (our national airport) and wondered what the current state of the Netherlands was. Wouldn't it be cool to walk into the arrivals hall and see the Dutch identity, which was build from an interactive pattern of colors which showed you what was going on? 

So each shape in the mosaic stands for one hour and is able to change color when a newsarticle is published. I took the seven biggest Dutch newspaper and subdivided them in order from the most serious one to the one that's taken less serious. When a newsarticle is published and shown in the simulation, the map of Geneva shows the section the article is related to. The color attached to the newspaper is based on the number of times a certain color has been used in the coat-of-arms of the different micronations. The more a color is used, the more serious it is taken. So when you look at the indicator on the right, orange on the left-handside is the color which is used the least and taken the less serious, yellow on the right-handside is used the most and indicates a very urgent newsarticle. The gradation used within the colors indicates the newspaper they're from; the less serious a newspaper is taken, the less intense the color of the typography is. When you now look at the mosaic-buildings, you see that after a few 'hours' there's a pattern starting to show, which pretty much shows the status of the different sections and they all together show the status of the country, which is in this case the Netherlands.

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