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 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.

Here's what my photo said:

A woman wearing a seriously awesome jacket that is printed with yellow, blue, and grey circles looks at her ipad rather than making eye contact with Matt Richardson.

I mean, my jacket *IS* seriously awesome! So it not only described what it saw, but it also has great fashion sense. What a clever programmer you may be thinking.

Ah, but it's all a ruse. Albeit, a very novel and sly ruse. Matt described being underwhelmed by the EXIF data provided by digital cameras which provides you with things like date, time, camera model, and sometimes geo-spatial info. He wanted to see a world where cameras actually told you about the contents of the photo. Undeterred by the fact that this type of technology isn't feasible or practical right now, Matt decided to take a more human approach. He uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk and alternatively, instant messages to his friends, to subvert the computational task of providing a textual description of the photo.

So back to how this made me rethink data. It struck me that sometimes it's not what's immediately in front of you. Sometimes it's the shadow of the thing that's important; sometimes it's what envelopes it, or connects it to its surroundings, or maybe even a subjective description of what it is. Sometimes it's not a jacket... it's a seriously awesome jacket.

[via @jcukier]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Related

• The Like Log Study: Buzzwords and engagement
• Sharing Personal Data to Push Social Data Analysis
• Difficulty Visualizing Social Networks

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]

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]

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.

Each film is broken into segments, where each segment represents ten shots. Color changes with each movie and with each ten-shot chapter. And then the segments are set in motion based on the amount of movement in that chapter so that action sequences show rapid pulsations. For example, the first circle in the top left is Alien, whereas the last one in the second row is The Simpsons.

See it in action in the animated video.

The code is available on github, and individual movie fingerprints are available in poster form.

[Cinemetrics via @blprnt]