Carley Johnson Looking Outwards 07

A project called “Amsterdam SMS” developed for MIT Senseable City Lab and Salzburg University.

This project was created by Aaron Koblin, and is an interactive tool that traced texts sent through Amsterdam. The data was provided by KPN mobile, and built with Processing and OpenGL. It’s a visualization of data, and it changes over time (IE more texts sent as the day goes on, the data changes). Aaron believes that data processing is the future of art and story, not just for business and computational related work. He has worked on everything from music videos to VR games and has work showcased around the globe. I like this project because it mixes an artistic sensibility (found in the colors, dimension, and interactivity of the tool) with a sense of use. I could look at this piece of data processing and see how this could could be extremely valuable to a company, as well as to a consumer. As for the created software, the piece was built with Processing and OpenGL.