Looking Outward 07 – Sean McGadden

Looking Outward

Sean McGadden

Studio NAND – London 2012 Olympics Tweet Visualization

Studio NAND captured and visualized a few aspects of the global response to the London 2012 Olympic Games by creating an emoto. It was a two part project made up an online visualization as well as an actual installation. The instillation was created using millions of tweets concerning the Olympics to understand the widespread feeling toward any specific part of the Olympic Games such as teams, games, events, etc..

The online visualization was a real time parallel to the actual games and created visualizations throughout the events. This visualizations allowed for exploration and discovery of new events and opinions.

The Physical Instillation was an accumulation and representation of all the data and information collected throughout the games in an interactive and overlayed series of models looking at time of Tweets as well as sentiment.

Eunice Choe – Looking Outwards – 07

This chart represents the seasonal trends of the search term “apricot”. This representation highlights the the patterns.

These charts represent the charts for different fruits.

The Rhythm of Food, by Moritz Stefaner (2015) is a data visualization project that displays patterns of food seasonality based on Google search data over a span of twelve years. This project interested me because it visualizes a set of extensive data in a visually pleasing way through a radial pattern. While this representation is abstract, you can still see the patterns and peaks of food seasonality. The designer developed an algorithm that creates a radial “year clock” that represents food trends. The algorithm is set up so that the distance from the center represents relative search interest, the segments represent search interest in the weeks within the past 12 years, and the color represents the year. The creator implements his artistic sensibilities through color and rhythm. The way the trends are represented radially makes the project seem like a beautiful piece of art at first glance when it actually reflects real life data.

Looking Outwards 07: Jaclyn Saik

Nicholas Felton is one of my new favorite designers. He is a trailblazer in the field of digital data visualisation, and I am especially interested in his story because he came from traditional graphic design and moved on to creating algorithms that collect data after he realized how much he enjoyed representing it through graphics. I have always been interested in editorial design specifically because a lot of times, it involved an interesting combination of powerful aesthetics and thought-out information representation, and it’s hyper focused on making the reader understand what it’s trying to communicate. Felton does this with his in a lot of his work, and especially in the project Daytum.

A screenshot example of the home panel for Felton’s own account, where his personal statistics are graphed elegantly in front of him.

The landing page for the website, which shares data from users around the world as an example of the programs capabilities.

Daytum is a platform an app that collects personal statistics from the user and elegantly communicates them in different ways. The spreadsheets and visuals it produces are created in the spirit of Felton’s famous Annual Reports. Based on the interface and the type of information this app tracks, I’m thinking that it is created with code that takes certain data sets (and has to have different versions or be flexible to different types of data) and then puts them through a program that organizes the data points in relationship to each other and plots/prints them in different formats. What I find interesting, as a communications designer who is currently studying typography, is that the program probably has to account for formatting errors and irregularities that come with differing data: longer words that change the word spacing, numbers that contain decimals or are greater/less than zero, and orphaned words and other paragraph issues. I think what makes this program so elegant is Felton’s eye for clean design, so that these personal data points are plotted neatly and elegantly no matter what they are.

This project was released in 2008. I know there are a lot of similar and far more developed apps out there now, but this is on the first times an iPhone app took on this form, and I think thats important.

Xindi Lyu-Looking Outwards 07

The installation project “Pixel Avenue” is installed on the underside of a tunnel where it can display the movements across the area. The creator of the project, digitalarti, designed it as a huge pixelated screen with white and blue lights to intimate a “clear sky” and when pedestrians, cars or any other movement occurs, the light bulbs to their positions would change their light colors red to reflect the movements. Its rhythm and forms are directly linked with the everyday life of the area.

I am inspired by this project because it again showed how the dynamic data can be visualized as something artistically dynamic but with the contexts of facts and statistics. It is a very innovative use of data visualization and the application of these visualizations is way more of an artistic approach.

Lingfan Jiang – Looking Outwards 07

This week, I am particularly interested in this project called “skies painted with unnumbered sparks”. It was done by an interactive artist, Aaron Koblin collaborated with Janet Echelman in 2014. Made entirely of soft fibers, the sculpture can attach directly into existing city architecture.

Being an architecture student myself, I really like how the artist started to think about the space between the buildings and how art could be involved in it. I really like the contrast between the hard concrete buildings and the smooth, light installation. Most importantly, with computational information visualization and great lighting effects, it really became something its audiences are willing to interact with. It is also amazing how people could just use their phones to draw lines and that would project directly onto the installation.

I think the final form of this art piece is very successful. As I mentioned earlier, this project is done by an interactive artist, Aaron Koblin and another artist, Janet Echelman, who mainly does amazing huge scale installation art. Therefore, I think the combination of the two artists really created something fascinating. As for the algorithm behind it, I would assume that the installation becomes a bigger monitor of people’s phones. Whatever is drawn on the phones would project directly on to the installation.

Furthermore, I think this kind of techniques could really make some science fiction movie scenes come true where a lot of projecting figures are floating in the air in the future.

Eliza Pratt – Looking Outwards 07

A breakdown of one of Refik Anadol’s data paintings, “Wind of Boston”, shows how wind pattern data is visualized through abstract art.

Refik Anadol is a Turkish media artist who specializes in “parametric data sculptures.” As demonstrated in his computational paintings, “Wind of Boston,” Anadol uses Processing.js to visualize site-specific data in the form of abstract art and installation. In this specific project, he analyzed the wind patterns around Boston by collecting data from the Boston Logan Airport. By taking factors like wind direction, speed, temperature, and noise fields into account, Anadol created a set of moving, coded displays to reflect these numbers. In his own words, he was motivated to find a “poetic way” to visualize the invisible. I admire this type of work as it finds a method of displaying data that is primarily expressive rather than informative. By embodying large quantities of ever-changing data in the form of an abstract painting, the audience is able to connect with the feeling of the wind patterns rather than the numbers behind it.

Victoria Reiter – Looking Outwards – 07

Computational interaction between humans and plants

Disney Research Pittsburgh has developed a project which uses a touch sensor to create an electromagnetic field around plants. The sensor detects minute disturbances in the field, and responds by creating a shapes and colors around the plant, in a type of aura, reacting to different forms of touch, movement, and proximity to the plant.

Orchid emitting an “aura” from the electromagnetic field

The video below demonstrates some interactions with the plants.

Video of interactions with plants

I think that this project is beautiful. It combines nature with technology, and although nature is already alive, it manages to animate it even further, giving these plants personalities, and making the interaction seem almost mutual rather than simply one-dimensional.

Furthermore, I thought it was fascinating that this project pertains to Pittsburgh, and in particular Disney Research Pittsburgh. Not sure how much the facts connect but shout-out to Randy Pausch just in case they do:) Just like how Randy Pausch combined technology and the arts, two “unlike forces,” so does this project combine technology and nature, another “unlikely” pair.

Full details on the project can be found here.

Jonathan Liang – Looking Outwards – 07

“I’m not a sheep” – Christopher Hitchens

The Sheep Market is a work by digital artist Aaron Koblin. Koblin payed 2 cents to 10,000 workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to draw a sheep facing left in 105 seconds. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is an intelligence department within the company that employs people to perform and coordinate tasks that computers and artificial intelligence could not currently do. This project is a direct reflection of the values of the department, showing that computers could not generate the little differences from human experience and individuality. Only people could generate completely different sheep, a computer would computationally generate sheep that have different traits, but are fundamentally similar. The emphasis on human individuality and experience is what I appreciate about this particular project.

http://www.thesheepmarket.com/

Jenny Hu — Looking Outwards 07

*the above video is the composed music alongside the data-visualization piece. (captioning not available)

Bruises— The Data that we don’t see, is a piece by Giorgia Lupi and Kaki King that uses Data Visualization to ask the following question:

“can a data visualization evoke empathy and activate us also at an emotional level, and not only at a cognitive one? Can looking at a data visualization make you feel part of a story of a human’s life?“

What I love about this piece, is that the designers are not just asking how data is scientific and computational, but also sensorial. This piece, in particular, takes in information about a child’s clinical records and her emotional experience as her body changes.

To read more about the piece, please read their medium article.

Sarah Yae Looking Outwards 7 Section B

“How Different Groups Spend Their Day” by Amanda Cox displays how different types of people (unemployed, employed, etc) spend their time during the day. I was intrigued by this visual because it was amazing how one could use computation to display such practical data. One could also easily pick out the type of data they wish to extract. For example, we can see that the unemployed sleep an hour more than the employed; the unemployed also spend an extra hour for house chores. It is amazing how Amanda Cox was able to get such data and display it in a visually appealing way, using computation. This type of display was not only highly informative, but also very visually pleasing.

To see more of her artwork, please follow the link: http://amandacox.tumblr.com/post/2709495753/a-peek-into-netflix-queues