The Shape of Song is a way of visualizing music that reveals repetition within a track. It’s an interesting way of profiling a song and revealing the underlying data, and the implementation uses arcs for some pretty cool looking shapes. Unfortunately, the visualization is static–when I ran it for the first time, I really expected the visualization to be generated as I listened to the song, and I was a little disappointed when it was already there.
‘Exhale Pavilion’ by Rotem and Huoang is an interactive installation in Miami Beach. The bio-luminescent ropes are inspired by algal blooms.
The installation is beautiful in it’s design and execution. The ropes are unique in a field saturated with LEDs and the colors are appropriate for an organic form and inspiration. Unfortunately the data which drives the lights is local wind data. This idea for data collection in interactive art is fairly played out.
This visualization shows facebook use throughout the world. It is similar to flight visualization data used to describe air traffic in the united states.
The blue colors are spectacular and the information highlights the use of facebook in North America Europe, Inda and South East Asia.
Bruce Munro’s ‘Light Shower‘ is not a data visualization but an art installation. It is designed to create an ambient, ethereal lighting environment in Salisbury Cathedral in the UK. This installation could easily be used as an interactive data visualization, however this seems out of place in a church. Arguably the piece is a visualization of the unknown.
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This app over at the NY Times is incredible because it allows you to look at demographics down to a block by block level. Pittsburgh is actually pretty incredibly how segregated are around the university neighborhoods.
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This is an interesting dataviz of what it is like to commute in many different American cities. It compares spending on roads vs amount of commuters in a city. Interesting to see where cities land. Although, I think it’s a little hard to understand. I can’t tell if Pittsburgh is a good or bad city in this regard.
Anthroposts [http://anthroposts.com/] is a collection of found post-it notes from various locations across the globe. The interactive site gives users the option to organize them by color, complexity, location, topic, and more, and can create a web of post it notes that use the same words. You can also click on each individual note to see its contents and get an interesting little glimpse into the life of some stranger. The information available about the content of each note was generated by humans through Mechanical Turk, so there are some pretty interesting and rich categories to play around with.
This project is basically a really pretty survey, but is advertised as a “personality infographic generator”. It starts by asking the user a few questions about their favorite food, mode of transport, online activity, etc. and then compiles them into an infographic displaying their answers next to statistics of what other people answered. What really struck me about this was that even though I didn’t realize you could change the language of the survey (it defaults to Portuguese), the icons were communicative enough so that I basically knew what was being asked. Although the content of the infographic is not particularly illuminating, its a good example of a visualization that both collects and displays information, and with nice graphics to boot.
This piece captures my attention because of the depth of historical and cultural information that can be obtained through a simple graphic. The paths of empires splitting up into independent nations is radically different for each empire, and a concise way of viewing that decline is presented with fissuring blobs, completely stripping centuries of historical tides down to raw numbers.
The Rubens’ Tube is a physical representation of sound waves using propane flames. The changes in air pressure that sound produces directly control a bar emitting a line of many small flames, which change size based on the sine wave of the audio. I would be very interested in doing a project of this type in which I can build a physical object that monitors real-time data input.
The brilliance of this bit is as much a factor of the fantastic representation of the data as it is the delivery of the narration. The way that he brings everything together over time, much like Visualizing Empires Decline, says a huge amount about how history has progressed.
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Natalie Jeremijenko’s “Dangling String” is a bit old-school at this point but I have to mention it if we are talking about favorite infrographics. While this isn’t drawing circles or drawing flow lines on a map like some data-heavy graphics recently emerging, the string is directly responding to bandwidth being used on the local network. As the traffic increases the string begins to spin more out of control. It occupied the corner of an office and much like a busy person in their own cubicle, the string had a space and an activity that was based on the collective action of the amount of internet use. Each byte flying through the ethernet cable moved a motor slightly. The output was a highly dynamic physical infogrpahic that had some embedded ambiguity. People were at first not entirely certain hows its movements were controlled. In my opinion some of the most successful physical computing projects use this as a tactic.
The Annual Feltron Report is an amazing collection of data visualizations from the private life of a data obsessed man name Nicholas Felton. Each day he collects data as he goes along ranging from the things he eats and drinks, to the destinations of travel, emails, parties, and even what his dog eats. He then turns this into an annual report that he publishes and has turned into quite a read. While his graphics aren’t jaw-dropping the amount of rigor it takes to extract this much data and consistently record it is inspiring. Simply put, you do not need an amazing data set to make an inspiring story behind your information visualization. Felton has some of the dullest data, but collectively it is someones life and everyone can relate to that and that is why it is truly awesome.
Ableton Live Checkers Step Sequencer by Josh Silverman
This uses computer vision to break up the checkers grid into step sequence notes that are then routed to Ableton Live. Uses OF for the vision. What I like about this project is the physical interaction with digital music, even more so than a monome or other physical controller. Combining gaming (although video uses it more like a midi controller), physical, digital, and sound. I would be interested in sounds coming out of an actual game of checkers. Game theory.
Digital: A Love Story is a text-based adventure that focuses on the early days of computing; it gives contemporary users a taste of the Amiga Workbench and early BBS boards, wrapped in a crunchy fiction shell.
The game brings over much of the joys and frustrations of 1980s computing; it allows for a taste of real anonymity, but also forces you to constantly switch connections, sometimes committing telephone fraud in the process.
I have played the game, and I think it almost goes too far into realism; I didn’t finish the game because I got frustrated with the amount of number-searching you have to do to get to the board you need to be on. The game needs to walk the line between frustrating and captivating; and a little too often, it teeters over the edge.
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A collection of several interesting augment reality project. The “using real lake to bounce ball” is quite interesting for it maps a fun behavior to an ordinary thing(environment) and it do looks funny. The army and soldier shooting part is also interesting for that it reminds people of their childhood, when they play toy soldier’s their small desk.
However, it seems the video is not well organized. The clips looks like picking randomly and some of them doesn’t convey the idea clearly.
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Check out this badass project, Geometric Death Frequency-141, by Prague-based artist Federico Díaz.
He uses an industrial robot to stack and glue together over 420,000 black ping-pong balls into a 50 foot by 20 foot sculpture. The form is defined by a fluid simulation run in a computer. The fabricated “wave,” simultaneously static and dynamic, takes over the gallery courtyard.
Why do women want larger and bigger eyes? Asian women tend to have stronger needs for bigger eyes as a standard of beauty, but relatively few of them are born with naturally big eyes. Those without big eyes can only look for alternative ways to make their eyes look prettier… the desires for bigger eyes can become almost obsessive, and many women opt for plastic surgery in order to make their dream come true.
I’ve seen people putting LEDs in their mouth, in their nose, but never thought of eyelashes. I find fascinating the implementation of this project as it really focuses on the goal of highlighting the eyes, without obstruction from electronics. I wonder what fashion trends will be coming up in the next few years…
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This is an interactive installation of a Tree. As you approach the Tree, its limbs slowly come to greet you. Once they reach your location, the branches pull back and begin to drip rhythmically in response to your presence. When the Tree has no visitors, it takes a resting posture that many have described as “willow-like.”
Usually, robots take traditional forms, and trees are not one of them. It is interesting to see the potential of electronics to bring alive such a magical creature that reminds us that we are not the only living habitants of the world.
The installation is set up in a museum, where the tree is surrounded by white walls. I would like to have set up the scene in a more elaborated space. Where the tree is not the unusual thing, but rather part of a more natural context.
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This is a set of five interactive doors that were installed in well-known public buildings in Lithuania’s capital. The doors became a portal to Lithuania’s Democracy Index, a musical instrument, a kinetic sculpture and even the source of an earthquake. Talking Doors ultimately proved to be not only the materialization of symbolic concepts but also a peculiar experiment that evoked a whole series of curious events.
The door shown above is the Democratic Door, the door that is open to democracy. The degree to which the door of the municipality’s building was open was controlled by a custom-made electronic door-closer reading the current value of the so-called “democracy index”. The latter was being formed in real time by processing the data obtained through the special online poll that asked web surfers to rate the level of Lithuania’s democratic development on a ten-point scale. The door’s position visualised the poll results and thus became a peculiar indicator of democratic development itself.
I believe find this project interesting (and in particular the Democratic Door) because is questions who has the power to set up the rules in a country. The creator proposes that if the Democratic Door was installed in all state institutions, then politicians would be physically pressed to respect democratic values and pursue democratic ideals. Otherwise they would be unable to leave their workplaces.
This idea is fascinating because it makes authority kind-of a physical concept. I wonder what would happen with this project in countries where the type of regimen is changing from democracy to something else. Could windows also take part of the game?
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Jared Tarbell makes work that is evocative of Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, but with another few levels of abstraction; they all use algorithms inspired by nature to achieve artistic forms, but Jared’s end results often look just as structured as the technology they were born out of.
What I find most interesting that while he co-founded Etsy, the handmade haven, his work is mostly about the code state. He considers code dead unless it’s being executed, and will not sell work.
While I appreciate the abstraction he is taking his forms to, I wish it would continue to abstract until it doesn’t look like the original inspiration at all anymore. While I love Jessia’s work, if everyone does picture-perfect representations of life, things will get boring.
Sketch Chair is a project by Greg Saul, who created a Processing application that allows users to design and rapid prototype their own furniture; in the case of the software, a chair.
While the project seems a little mundane on the outside, that’s what I really enjoy about it; it’s one more step towards bringing this sort of technology into wider use. There is nothing more everyday than a chair; the project is for those who would not necessarily usually turn to computing.
The project also makes the DIY scene that much easier to get into (which may be a good or a bad thing; on one hand, less mass production and more power to the people; on the other hand, the world already has a great deal of uncomfortable chairs; judging by the photo of Sketch Chairs, I would say this project will increase that number drastically.
This is one of my favorite information visualization pieces. It’s created from data compiled by the American Time Use Survey and plots graphs to show the proportion of Americans engaging in specific activities for every hour of the day. Using the tool, one can get a very precise picture of what an average person is doing at any moment of any day. More fascinating is the ability to slice this data demographically to see the difference between how teenages and senoirs spend their days, or how men and women differ in their daily schedules. It enables the viewer to get a much larger sense of the data than just what is presented on the screen. With any data visualization task this large, the greatest challenge remains how to display information in ways that make sense and convey meaning. I think that this graph accomplishes this well.
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Silk is a web-based piece of interactive computational art that allows users to draw curves and have those curves animate into more colorful and complex forms. The project creates hauntingly beautiful abstracts based on simple input with predictable, but complex behavior. The program could benefit from a wider variety of behaviors as well as the introduction of audio feedback to create a more varied and dynamic experience.
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The tonematrix is a 16 step, 16 note, sequenced web-based music generator. Notes are highlighted when pressed and then triggered when the sequences steps through horizontally. It is a tremendously expressive instrument for appearing as just an array of 256 buttons. It’s easy to use and understand and the feedback, both visual and audio are satisfying and informative. At the same time, the sound is simple and predictable, and variations in button combination don’t create enough sounds that feel new.
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