Ankitha Vasudev – Looking Outwards – 07

Flight Patterns is a time-lapse animation made by Aaron Koblin, a digital media artist and entrepreneur, in 2011. This project displays American air-traffic patterns and densities over a 24-hour time period, by following the routes of around 140,000 American planes crossing the United States. I found this project interesting because of the way it visualizes this information. The artist uses a variety of color and patterns to illustrate a wide range of data including aircraft type, no-fly zones, weather patterns and alteration to routes.

As the animation reveals iterations of flight patterns during the cycle, the viewer experiences a changing, phantom geography of the country with airline hubs appearing as bright points of diffusion within a complex web.This project employs data visualization and processing, an open-source computer programming environment. FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) data was all parsed and plotted using Processing. Koblin’s use of aggregate data to reflect on life and our systems is a reflection on the relationship between humans and technology.