Lanna Lang – Looking Outwards – 07

Aaron Koblin’s “Amsterdam SMS” // 2007

This project is a dynamic visualization of the mass volume of SMS messages that were transmitted on the night of New Year’s Eve across Amsterdam, revealing the city’s buildings and structures. This interactive tool was built with Processing and OpenGL. What inspires me about this project is that it usually isn’t the type of art I would normally gravitate towards, but it’s unique concept of taking the data of all the SMS messages from one of the busiest nights ever and forming a city’s cityscape with its volume is very intriguing and out-of-the-box.

I appreciate how Koblin includes a timelapse of how the SMS messages varied across the month of December, so that the drastic jump on January 1^st  is exaggerated even further, displaying how many people were looking at their phone screens at the time of change of the new year. What Koblin got right was the message that this sends across by freezing the frame as soon as the date turned January 1^st, and I would love to see this project redone now, and how modern technology has affected society even further than it did in 2007.

In general with Koblin and his use of data visualization art, Koblin was inspired by his interest in computer gaming and being exposed to the rich data of society that we live in, as well as learning from the two professors from UCLA who created Processing.