Avena+ Test Bed, by Benedikt Groß

Huh. I guess, as a society, we’re learning more about how crops work, and we’re seeing that big monocrops are not the smartest way to plant. Which begs the question, what is? Apparently it’s now possible to plant things in a pretty precise pattern.

This struck me as particularly neat, for a couple reasons. I guess it’s the next stage of the large-scale 3D printer. It feels useful, of course, as we try to get used to feeding 9 billion people in sustainable ways. But it’s also beautiful; or it could be, at least. For example, look at the little smiley face there. Our next field could be an artwork, or rather, our next artwork could appear on a field, and feed us too.

This also makes me wonder about food and technology. So far, a lot of technology applied to food has been unsustainable – pesticides, factory farming, etc. But stuff like this, with no obvious downside to me, makes me wonder if it might just come back around to be helpful after all.

Oil, by Dmitry Morozov (::vtol::)

Visitors put in a small object, a hydraulic press crushes it, and then that sound, slowed down, becomes the artwork. Cool because it’s sort of haunting, it exploits the fact that anything slowed down enough sounds good. Ultimately, it’s ephemeral – it turns your object into sound. It feels like it’s really playing with time; smearing an object along the 4th dimension, if you will. Similar to those companies that let you turn people’s ashes into a diamond, changing the form of something can really change the way you experience it.

Data visualization things that I found interesting:

Islamic Sects. This one is just practical. You get a sense of what the groups are, how they differ, and how big each one is. It’s a little weird that I could almost draw this chart for Christianity, and maybe Buddhism, but before seeing this I’d only heard of Sunni, Shia, Wahabi, and Sufi. Other things I learned: Wahabi looks like an offshoot of an offshoot. I guess I’d have thought it was bigger. What didn’t it do? I wish it had more info about each subgroup. Just by looking at it, I have no idea what the difference is between Hanbali and Hanafi, say, except that they are biggest in different places.

Nexity – My Neighborhood. They tried to give you a new way to look at a new house/apartment by rearranging things in the world based on how far they are. For example, the place below has 15 sports bars, 15 cocktail bars, etc within 30 minutes, and you can easily see how far they all are.

This would be useful if you were moving somewhere new, sure. The downside is, I still don’t really feel much from this. I guess if one place had a lot of bars nearby, you could see that, but it doesn’t really feel like it. On the other hand, it’s a great aggregation of a lot of useful info at the same time. (if I moved here, where would I buy groceries? where’s the post office? etc.)

“Qi Visualizer” by Yuan Yifan (2014)

Qi Visualizer is an application and collective data installation. Users download the app, place their finger onto of their camera light and it records your pulse activity, creating a pulse spectogram which is considered “an artistic interpretation of Qi”[1]. You can then upload the image to the twitter handle for it to be viewed in space. This installation connects people with biometric information in a personalized manner, the installation allows for people to compare their “personal informatics” and see others biometrics, when complied it looks as a topographical map. Yifan identifies the current culture to track information about ourselves, and creates an immersive experience by projecting the information in a gallery. The privacy of our body becomes public. I think that the installation fails as some may not understand what a spectogram is, or fathom the rhythm of their heartbeat. It immerses you with segments of real time uploads and feedback, but do the users relate to other people? Do they connect or understand what the images says? It doesnt seem that they can deduce any information about themselves other than recognizing their own spectogram on the screen and feeling ownership of the image.

[1]http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2655621

“Flight Patterns” by Aaron Koblin (2005)

FAA data was utilized to create this visualization of planes flighting in and out over North America. Aaron Koblin utilized the information that preexisted to determine patterns of arriving and departing flights. We can understand the most travelled cities, and formulate an understanding of how flight transportation is affected by the type of airport and infrastructure/trade of different cities. Aaron discussed in his TedTalk that when you zoom in on the flight information you can see how arriving planes circulate the area from different directions to prepare for landings. I remember seeing an image similar to this before but didn’t realize it was about flight information. It makes me question what other data can we utilized to create connections between the way transportation, and other systems are influenced by culture and industry. This project allows for perspective on information you could never see without this imaging, I wish that you could have more data to know the names of where the flights come from and go to, understanding the plane sizes and how flights differentiate based on where they are flying and due to weather conditions. It made me think of walking on surfaces, you don’t see the footprints unless the ground is muddy or there is snow on the ground, but how much land is covered each day while we walk on the sidewalk . What are the patterns people take to avoid a broken sidewalk?