Looking-Outwards-Week-02

Flight Patterns / Aaron Koblin

This week, looking at Generative Art, it was fascinating to see how artists write a set of rules and allow art to create itself by following them.

A project I was especially excited about was “Flight Patterns” by Aaron Koblin. This project creates an animation that illustrates the daily schedule of flights to and from the US:

I especially liked that by creating a visual representation of potentially mundane information, the artist was able to create a beautiful work of art. In addition to the highly aesthetic qualities of this work, the viewer can observe patterns in data that would otherwise be meaningless. For example, at a certain time, one side of the continent “wakes up” and slowly spreads to the west. Another example is a sudden flood of incoming international flights.

This type of work, where data is visualized by using a set of rules written by a computer program, allows us to interact with accessible information in a new and engaging way. Furthermore, this work could be extended in both visualizing larger areas (e.g. the whole world) or zooming into specific areas in the US that would allow to discover additional patterns.