Simin – Looking Outwards 7 – [OLD – FALL 2016] 15-104 • COMPUTING for CREATIVE PRACTICE

A Facebook Flower by Stamen Designs

Facebook Flowers is a project by Rachel Binx and Stamen Design that visualizes how posts are shared on Facebook. Her animations show in less than a minute how single posts are distributed and redistributed in the Facebook community in the course of 3 months. Binx uses WebGL to turn data like gender, time since first shared and times posts have been shared into beautiful flower like images. After trying several ways to visualize this data Binx decided that having curves branch out of each individual could best exhibit the connections made through online interaction. The more shares a post gets the more branches it generates. Posts reposted at an earlier stage fade to white gives you the sense of time and the way different genders have different colors adds to the animation’s complexity and Dynamicity.

Experimenting with colors in Facebook Flowers by Stamen Designs

What’s interesting is that this project can tell stories in an abstract manner. In the flower of Marvin the Martian you can see at 10 seconds and 20 seconds there is a sudden burst at the original point. This tells you that there was someone very influential who reposted the image and caused a ripple of effects. In addition, the end of the video, which is 3 months in real time, everything goes white. The epidemic like post is no longer reposted and loses its popularity. It gives me a sense of how all it takes is an influential person to launch something to stardom and an equally short amount of time for this once omnipresent epidemic to lose its popularity.

Links

Rachel Binx on Facebook Flowers

Stamen Turns Facebook Sharing Into Intricate Digital Art

Data Visualization: Photo-Sharing Explosions