Nathalie- Looking Outwards

So Musicovery by Frederic Vavrille is pretty much amazing.

(musicovery.com)

Essentially it’s Pandora.com, but with a really cool visual aspect to it. It generates radio for you based on music genres and songs/artists that you’ve favorited, and then it uses  your favorite songs to generate a visual map of your musical interests.

I think from a synesthetic viewpoint this is really fascinating, because ways of visualizing music with relationships based on genre and sound and color has always interested me. It’s more visually interesting than any music visualizing system I’ve seen yet, also.

 

Another piece I found interesting is called StarryNight, by Alex Galloway, Mark Tribe, Martin Wattenberg.

http://archive.rhizome.org/starrynight/

Essentially what it does is that it turns every text and article on Rhizome.com into a star on the map, and every time one of those texts is read on the site, its corresponding star gets a little brighter. Over time, this uses people’s interaction with the site to build a star map out of all the articles on the site, and it makes it easy to tell which ones are most-read. When a user of the star map hovers over any particular star, they can view keywords relating to the article that star represents, and by choosing one it will generate a constellation connecting all the other stars that share that keyword. It’s a really endearing way of visualizing a lot of information at once.

Finally, we have the Grand Taxonomy of Rap Names.

http://blog.kobayashi.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/poster_rappers_1300.jpg

Mostly I find this interesting because it’s a very frivolous subject matter, but also because I like these sorts of bubble graphs with all the lines sprouting off the bubbles and I think they’re a really fun way of looking at information. The use of color to me is what makes this an artistic piece as opposed to just a really nice way of viewing information, even if the subject matter is a little silly.