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]

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]

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.

See it in action in the video below.

Has anyone from Berlin seen this going? I wonder how accurate the software is and what the cutoff is for a happy city.

[Stimmungsgasometer via infosthetics]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[Obscura Digital via infosthetics]