James Katungyi – Looking Outwards – 08

Artist: Patricio Gonzalez Vivo
Title: Point Cloud City

Patricio started his professional career as a pyschologist in Brazil. He specialized in what he called ‘expressive art therapy’ – using art as a medium to express a person’s ‘interior landscape’. He then trained as programmer in Argentina.  He now works in New York with Mapzen – a company that develops open source tools to visualize data. He describes his work as using code and light to animate data. He credits ‘shaders’ for the effectiveness of his work.

Patricio combines engineering and art – an difficult mix in my opinion. He combines engineering’s cold, hard data with the artist’s organic expressiveness. He makes data aesthetically appealing by bridging ‘science’ and ‘art’.  Among his most interesting projects is Point Cloud City (shown above) where he takes depth data from Google Street View images and recreates an animation of the scenes in point clouds with light.

His command of the tools of his work and the mesmerizing results make his presentations captivating. The lessons I took are not so much how to present my work as what possibilities there are in using code to visualize data.

He talks about his latest project on how to visualize the effects of sea level rises in San Francisco and New York at Eyeo 2016 ‘What are the chances?’