Data Art

• Tracking the grizzly bear in emotional interactive documentary

  February 6, 2012 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (1)

  

  In a blend of data and storytelling, Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison dig into surveillance logs generated by a monitored grizzly bear between 2001 and 2009. The final work is a moving interactive documentary, Bear 71.

  She lived her life under near-constant surveillance and was continually stressed by interactions with the human world. She was tracked and logged as data, reflecting the way we have come to see the world around us through Tron and Matrix-like filters, qualifying and quantifying everything, rather than experiencing and interacting.

  Leanne Allison sifted through thousands of photos from motion-triggered trail cameras for this project. The grainy images gathered over the past 10 years by various scientists reveal the hidden life of the forest, played out by the animals and humans — including Bear 71 — captured covertly on film.

  It begins with the capture of a grizzly, its tagging, and then release, as a first-person narrative tells a story through the eyes of the bear. You, the observer, are allowed to follow the bear and explore its environment on an abstract map, and somewhere along the way digital and the physical world melt together.

  [Bear 71 via @wiederkehr]

• Cinemetrics creates a visual fingerprint for movies

  January 12, 2012 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (2)

  

  As we saw with movie barcodes, each film has a uniqueness that can be broken into bits of data. Cinemetrics, by Frederic Brodbeck, provides a different view.
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• Bach Cello Suites visualized

  December 8, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (20)

  As a resident at Eyebeam, Alexandar Chen visualizes the first Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suites:

  Using the mathematics behind string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music’s underlying structure and subtle shifts.

  Interaction version here. Charming.

  [Alexander Chen via @blprnt]

• Smiley installation shows the mood of a city

  December 2, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (7)

  

  Project Stimmungsgasometer (say what?) is a giant smiley face that changes based on the mood of Berlin citizens. When they are collectively "happy" the light is a smile, and when they are not, it is a sad face. Input comes from facial recognition software that takes in video from a strategically placed camera. The software estimates whether passers by are happy or not, and then installation changes accordingly.
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• Google Streetview stop motion

  November 24, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (18)

  Address is Approximate by Tom Jenkins tells the story of a lonely desk toy who goes on a road trip with Google streetview. I've watched this multiple times, and can't get enough. Beautiful and touching. [via]

• History of the sky

  November 21, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (10)

  Ken Murphy installed a camera on top of the Exploratorium in San Francisco and set it to take a picture every ten seconds for a year. A History of the Sky is those pictures as a series of time-lapse movies where each day is represented with a grid. So what you see 360 skies at once:

  Time-lapse movies are compelling because they give us a glimpse of events that are continually occurring around us, but at a rate normally far too slow to for us to observe directly. A History of the Sky enables the viewer to appreciate the rhythms of weather, the lengthening and shortening of days, and other atmospheric events on an immediate aesthetic level: the clouds, fog, wind, and rain form a rich visual texture, and sunrises and sunsets cascade across the screen.

  Time-lapse: Yep, still fascinating.

  [murphlab via Data Pointed]

• 24 hours of Flickr photos printed to fill a room

  November 15, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (21)

  

  People upload thousands of pictures to Flickr every day, but the numbers and rates don't give the picture count justice. For the Future of Photography Museum in Amsterdam, Erik Kessels printed 24 hours of Flickr photos:

  As you might imagine, this results in a lot of images, that fill the gallery space in an avalanche of photos. "We're exposed to an overload of images nowadays," says Kessels. "This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and un-selfconsciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples' experiences."

  [Creative Review via Waxy]

• Manual data design from Stefanie Posavec

  November 9, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Add Comment

  Designer Stefanie Posavec talks about her process of data collection, analysis, and design. There's a lot of advantages to knowing how to program, but there can also be value in meticulous manual discovery if you're willing to put in that extra time.

  Of course, it's still all about the data:

  So what inspires this level of analysis? "I'm interested in things that appeal to the really vigorous detailed aspect in me," she explains. "Everything I have done so far has revolved around things that I love such as books, language, maths and numbers. As long as I'm looking at something that I'm really interested in, it makes the days and hours of sifting through and analysing a subject easier."

  [Stefanie Posavec via feltron]

• Microsoft envisions the near future in technology and interaction

  November 3, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (11)

  In a follow-up to last year's visions of the future, Microsoft imagines interacting with data and information in 2020. It is the land of big displays, linked devices, and projections in the real world. It's mostly from a productivity standpoint, but there's crossover to the everyday.

  To be honest though, all I really want are power laces, a self-drying coat, a flying car, and rehydrating pizza. I wouldn't mind a hover board either, but it's not urgent. I don't think that's too much to ask. I can deal with not being able to flick graphs in the air if it means getting the important things sooner.

  [Video Link via @juiceanalytics]

• Facebook connections displayed in physical space

  October 20, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Add Comment

  

  For Facebook's F8 developer conference, creative agency Obscura Digital delivered the Connections installation. People could log in and see how they related to others through the eyes of circular visuals projected on the ground:

  Once “logged in” to Connections, a radial visualization, constructed from the user’s social graph data, surrounds them creating a unique “fingerprint”. Colored lines extend from the circles connecting people who share one or more of the observed metrics (mutual friends, interests, workplaces, schools, locations, birth sign, or non-English languages). When two or more people, who have mutual connections, stand within close proximity, a slideshow of mutual friends and interests appear between them.

  See it in action below. Take it a bit further, and I bet this could be a fun game. Or a novelty in a nerdy bar.
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• #thankyousteve

  October 7, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (5)

  

  Twitter engineer Miguel Rios pays tribute to the man, the legend. Zoomed out you see the portrait of Steve Jobs. Zoom in, and you see public tweets tagged with #thankyousteve sent out over a four and a half hour period on the evening of October 5. Tweets are ordered by number of retweets, left to right and top to bottom.
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• Twitter users as organisms, Tweetures

  October 6, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Add Comment

  

  Twitter is a bustling place of tweets, retweets, and replies, and the growth and spread of news can be very organic. After all, there are actual human beings using the service. Kunal Anand, Director of Technology at the BBC, played on this idea of Twitter as an ecosystem and created Tweetures.
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• Live data wall and immersive film at THINK exhibit

  September 28, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (3)

  

  The THINK exhibit from IBM just opened up at Lincoln Center in New York, complete with data wall and immersive film. The former visualizes surrounding data in real-time, such as traffic, solar energy, and air quality. The formers puts you in a place with 40 seven-foot screens.
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• Musical spectrum analysis

  September 22, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (3)

  Jon-Kyle Mohr visualizes the musical spectrum of a song in this mesmerizing video. As the song plays, frequencies bubble up in the 6-o-clock position, and the trace remains as the circle rotates.

  [Video Link via feltron]

• You Are What You Eat

  July 22, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (5)

  

  The phrase "you are what you eat" usually refers to health and weight, but the food in your fridge can say a lot about who you are, what you do, and where you're from. Photographer Mark Menjivar used this premise in his series You Are What You Eat.
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• Elements of Happiness: A happy life depicted in diagrams

  June 27, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (5)

  

  For several decades, Harvard Laboratory of Adult Development has chronicled the lives of hundreds of men from adolescence through adulthood for "an unprecedented database of life histories with which to view the dynamic character of the aging process." Designer Laura Javier took ten of those cases and visualized them in the Elements of Happiness.
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• Yacht design inspired by Voronoi diagram

  June 10, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (2)

  

  Industrial architect Hyun-Seok Kim, known for eccentric yacht designs, uses Voronoi diagrams as his latest inspiration:

  Still at the design stage, the 125-meter vessel is adorned with a complex lattice exterior that its designer, South Korean industrial architect Hyun-Seok Kim, says is based on an algorithmic diagram by Georgy Voronoy, a math professor who lived under the Russian empire during the late 1800s.

  I can't wait for the subsequent bar, pie, and treemap yachts. They will be glorious.

  [CNN via @shiffman]

• Keyboard with keys raised by frequency of use

  June 9, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (11)

  

  Mike Knuepfel, a student in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, uses key frequency, according to Wikipedia, to build a keyboard sculpture. Taller keys equals higher frequency.

  Conclusions – This was just a first go at trying to create a data driven 3d sculpture. I wound up scaling the keys a little bit too much in the vertical direction. The weight of the tall keys caused the towers to tilt at an angle. I plan on showing this prototype to a few people that will hopefully give me more ideas for new data sets to look at. I want to try and use the CNC for future data driven sculptures. I also want to try and include color into the sculpture somehow.

  Not bad for a first run. My proposed next step: Sculpturize the entire computer. You've got your keyboard. Next use some tracking software for mouse button clicks, and then use this software to track the mouse pointer for a sculptured monitor.

  [Keyboard Frequency Sculpture via Boing Boing]

• Aaron Koblin on visualizing humanity

  May 27, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (1)

  Aaron Koblin, Creative Director of Google's Data Arts team, shares some of the many projects that he's worked on his recent TED talk (video below). Even if you don't know the name, you've undoubtedly come across his work. The takeaway of his talk:

  An interface can be a powerful narrative device, and as we collect more personally and socially relevant data, we have an opportunity and maybe even an obligation to maintain a humanity and tell some amazing stories as we explore and collaborate together.

  It's not all facts and figures, dontcha know.
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• Art reproduction incongruencies

  May 12, 2011 to Data Art  •  Share on Twitter  •  Comments (1)

  

  When you think art reproduction, you probably think of something that looks almost identical to the original piece, but as Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas show in The Art of Reproduction, factors such as color and size can vary a lot:

  Curious just how far reproductions stray from each other, we began an investigation... For a set of famous artworks, we downloaded all the plausible copies we could find. Then we wrote software to reconstruct each artwork as a mosaic, a patchwork quilt where each patch comes from an individual copy.

  The above is a mosaic of reproductions of 21 Tears by Man Ray, and as you can see, the colors across reproductions span grayscale to green. Continue Reading