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A meditation on race produces a pleasant multi-colored swirl of dots and dashes. An apparent denunciation of capitalism makes long red and green streaks. And a string of "R's" makes a hypnotic set of circles.

Local artist Lori Hepner is turning posts on Twitter into a colorful kaleidoscope while encouraging people to reconsider the picture they're creating of themselves when they post personal messages on social networking sites, including Facebook, Myspace and, of course, Twitter. She's calling the project "Status Symbols."

"The Internet is really making a portrait of people whether they think about it or not," says Hepner, a professor of integrative arts at Penn State's Greater Allegheny Campus in McKeesport for the past three years.

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Hepner was commissioned by the Brooklyn Museum in New York to produce a series of works of art throughout the month of December for subscribers to the museum's Twitter account, 1stFans.

Twitter posts are limited to just 140 characters, so Hepner asked followers to describe themselves within that space. She's feeding their responses into a computer program that converts them into pulses on string of red, green and blue light-emitting diodes, which are mounted to a spinning platform.

Hepner then takes time-exposure photographs of the spinning LEDs and posts links to the pictures back to the Twitter feed, allowing the users to see the patterns created by the computer.

The abstract patterns could be seen to represent the fractured portrait that users create by "tweeting" their inner-most thoughts to both friends and strangers alike.

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Hepner has posed several questions --- her most recent asked the Twitter subscribers to "tell me how you see yourself next year" --- and says the answers have ranged from "pretty thoughtful to 'in the moment.'"

"Sometimes there's a day or two lag time before they respond with what they want to write," she says. "But one person just sent back a string of 'RRRRRs.' It made for a very interesting photograph. I'm OK with whatever people are writing to me."

Hepner, a Carrick native, created the LED controller with help from HackPittsburgh, a non-profit group of artists, engineers and other technologists who meet to exchange ideas and skills for craft projects. It's programmed using an ordinary personal computer running the free Arduino software.

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Despite the electronic nature of the material that Hepner's using to "paint" her pictures, the final product is decidedly low-tech --- she shoots her photos using conventional color-print film because she says it provides a richer, more colorful picture than a digital camera could produce.

She takes two versions of each picture --- one through a soft-focus diffuser, the other a sharper, focused photo. For now, the pictures can only be seen by members of the Brooklyn Museum, but at the end of the month Hepner can begin exhibiting them to the public.

Hepner, who teaches photography and video imaging classes at Penn State's city campus, says the month-long experiment is a form of performance art.

"There have been other experiments in 'crowd-sourced' art, but I wanted to try this because I'm trying to get people to really think about themselves, and how they put themselves out there on the Internet," she says.

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A graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology and the Rhode Island School of Design, Hepner's photographs have been shown around the country and locally at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Silver Eye Center for Photography and the Three Rivers Arts Festival.

She's looking to expand this idea into a larger-scale installation that can be shown to the public.

"I've considered using these portraits to create wall-size works, and I've been playing with the idea of using the geo-tagging feature of Twitter to maybe make map-like drawings," Hepner says.

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Right now, she's enjoying both the patterns that the computer generates from the Twitter posts, and the joy of discovering what develops --- quite literally --- when her prints are complete.

"I like that I don't really know what it's going to look like until it gets put on film," Hepner says. "I never really know what I'm going to get."

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Samples of Hepner's work and a schedule of her upcoming gallery shows can be found at her website.