Data Art

• Typewriter installation remembers killed journalists

  May 31, 2012 to Data Art by Nathan Yau

  

  Julian Koschwitz uses a typewriter linked to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists to generate stories about those who have fallen doing their jobs.

  The typewriter installation On Journalism #2 Typewriter writes generatively constructed stories about all journalist who have been killed worldwide between 1992 and today based on the existing data of their lives as well as their published work. The individual stories are connected through common fields of coverage, places, professions and many other aspects. Besides the text the typewriter creates also images e.g. flags which are heavier distorted the more journalists got killed in that particular country.

• Meshu makes physical objects with your location

  May 30, 2012 to Data Art by Nathan Yau

  

  Location data typically stays within the realm of online maps and digital check-ins, but in many ways it's the most personal data that you can find. It represents where you are, where you've been, and where you're going. Meshu, by Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx, is a project that takes this sentiment to heart.

  Select and enter locations on a map or grab your check-ins from foursquare to create your own piece of unique jewelry — necklace, earrings, or cufflinks. Once you've got your design, you have your choice of acrylic, wood, nylon, and silver and you can pick from a variety of colors for each material. Hit complete, they'll fabricate it, and you've got your own personal snapshot of life.

• Relational ornaments

  May 20, 2012 to Data Art by Kim Rees

  

  Gundega Strautmane, a Latvian textile artist and designer, visualizes social and physical networks in a show called Relational Ornaments. The networks are created using various sized pins to depict nodes and threads connecting them to show relationships. Bringing visualization into the tactile world lends it a weight not able to be achieved on a computer screen. It allows the viewer to pause, spend time with the information, feel it, sense it in a more holistic way. The placement of pins and threads is imprecise because they are placed by hand giving the work a very natural, organic feel rather than the rigidity of the exact calculations of programming.

  [via The Network Thinkers]

• The Descriptive Camera

  May 16, 2012 to Data Art by Kim Rees

  

  The unassuming little Descriptive Camera made me rethink data. This project by Matt Richardson was on display at the ITP Spring Show. The basic premise is that you take a photo and the camera spits out a textual description of what it sees. The results are remarkably accurate, detailed, and humorous.
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• Stop motion music video

  May 11, 2012 to Data Art by Nathan Yau

  Music visualization with stop motion board games. You can't go wrong.

  [via @jcukier]

• Mad Men as thousands download via bittorrent

  April 20, 2012 to Data Art by Nathan Yau

  The BitTorrent protocol lets groups of people download parts of a single file from each other, so instead of one file from a single source, you get multiple bits from different places. Artist Conor McGarrigle shows this activity via an episode of Mad Men, as it's downloaded.

  The video captures an episode of the popular TV show in the act of being shared by thousands of users on bittorent with the corruption of the file a direct result of the bittorrent protocol. The video acts as a visualisation of bittorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing and avoids infringing the copyright of Madmen as it is incomplete. Curiously the greater number of simultaneous users sharing the file the more aesthetically pleasing are the distortion effects.

  Poetic almost.

  [via Waxy]

• Generative art portrays beauty in movement

  March 12, 2012 to Data Art by Nathan Yau

  Heading towards the 2012 Olympics in London, Quayola and Memo Aktenvia translate athletic movement, which in itself is often considered beautiful, to generative animations. Collectively, the piece is called Forms, which is on exhibit at the National Media Museum.

  Forms is a digital artwork that responds to the human body in motion. It focuses exclusively on the mechanics of movement, using footage of world-class athletes to illustrate human movement at the extremes of perfection.

  Videos of athletes were processed through custom software to create evolving abstract forms that explore the relationships between the human body and its movements through time and space.

  There's also a short Q&A with the artists on the Creators Project that's worth a read.

  [via The Creators Project]

• Geographic news coverage visualized

  March 9, 2012 to Data Art by Nathan Yau

  Kitchen Budapest explores local news coverage in Hungary with sound and a bubbling map.

  Ebullition visualises and sonificates data pulled from one of the biggest news sites of Hungary, origo.hu. In the 30 fps animation, each frame represents a single day, each second covers a month, starting from December 1998 until October 2010.

  Whenever a Hungarian city or village is mentioned in any domestic news on origo.hu website, it is translated into a force that dynamically distorts the map of Hungary. The sound follows the visual outcome, creating a generative ever changing drone.

  Next step: show the news causing those bubbles.

  [Submap | Thanks, Attila]

• Your personal networks visualized as microbiological cells in Biologic

  March 8, 2012 to Data Art by Nathan Yau

  

  Data exists in digital form, on our computers and spreadsheets, but the exciting part about data is what it represents in the real world. Bits are people, places, and things. This is especially true with social data from places like Twitter and Facebook, where ideas flow and people talk to interact with each other in different ways. It's not just retweets and likes. Bloom Studio, the folks who brought you Planetary, embrace this idea in their just released iPad app, Biologic.

  The basic concept: choose a social network from the Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn blobs on the opening screen. You will have to authenticate each one you try (only the first time) and then you will transition into a view of the people you follow represented as microbiological cells.

  Glowing shapes inside the cells are activities (tweets, pictures, etc). The bigger the activity, the newer it is. The more the activity is moving, the more retweets/favorites/likes it has. Once you have read an item it gets darker so you can tell what's new.

  It looks like another great blend of data, generative art, and game dynamics. I don't have an iPad though, so I'll live vicariously through your comments. Grab Biologic (for free) on iTunes.

  [Bloom Studios | Thanks, Tom]

• Data in a human context

  March 6, 2012 to Data Art by Nathan Yau

  Jer Thorp, a data artist in residence at The New York Times, shows off some of his work (like this and this) and speaks about the connection between the real world and the mechanical bits we know as data. Worth your 17 minutes.

  People often miss this point about data — that it's a representation of the physical world — and because of that, things like uncertainty and complexity come attached to the numbers. There are also actual human beings associated with a lot of data. So while optimization, maximization, and efficiency are well and good, stories, ethics, and lessons are pretty good takeaways, too.

  Update: Don't miss the unexpected discussion around data and capitalism.

  [Jer Thorp]

• Tracking the grizzly bear in emotional interactive documentary

  February 6, 2012 to Data Art by Nathan Yau

  

  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 by Nathan Yau

  

  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 by Nathan Yau

  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 by Nathan Yau

  

  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 by Nathan Yau

  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 by Nathan Yau

  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 by Nathan Yau

  

  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 by Nathan Yau

  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 by Nathan Yau

  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 by Nathan Yau

  

  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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