Locals and Tourists by Eric Fischer

This is a map of New York City with a layer of information revealing where tourists and locals take photographs. Tourists are red, locals are blue, and the yellow areas are where both groups mix together. Eric Fischer has created graphics like this for many cities by analyzing thousands of geotagged images from Flickr.com. His program determines if the person who took the picture is from the area or not and creates a dot with the corresponding color. This simple idea reveals a lot about the dynamics of major cities and how “tourist” zones are often compartmentalized from the rest of the city.

Conductor: www.mta.me from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

Conductor by Alexander Chen

I am a musician and have spent a lot of time in New York so this creation by Alexander Chen really intrigued me. His work, Conductor, takes data from the MTA about when trains are arriving or departing and maps their routes using HTML5 and Javascript. Routes become plucked strings when they intersect each other and the resulting sounds escalate as the time approaches rush hour. The idea that static data such as a train schedule can be manipulated into a dynamic visualization is very inspiring for me. Using this visualization to create music is a great idea that sets a new precedent for how we can experience information. The concept of using senses besides our eyes to experience data is very interesting.

Baroque.me: J.S. Bach – Cello Suite No. 1 – Prelude from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

Baroque.me: J.S. Bach by Alexander Chen

I will finish this first Looking Outwards with another musical visualization work by Alexander Chen. This project visualizes the first J.S. Bach Cello Suite using 8 lines that act as strings. These strings are plucked by dots rotating on a circle and the strings change length to indicate pitch. This visualization is very effective at revealing the underlying tonal and rhythmic structures of this piece. Music of the Baroque era is very mathematical; this visualization helps to show that there is a constant structure over which Bach wrote this piece. I am all for any visualization that makes something complex, such as musical structures, more comprehensible to the untrained listener.