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Artist Aaron Koblin visualized using bright colors and overlapping shapes to mark the many different pathways across North America by air travel. This project was originally developed by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne for a project called “Celestial Mechanics” and uses data from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to help track these planes. This piece conceptualizes these pathways for over a 24 hour period.
I enjoy the visuals of this time-lapse animation piece because these colorful routes remind me of fireworks and show where each route starts and ends. It also paints a bigger picture for me to see how much the US relies on planes and how many airports we have. With the data collected from the FAA, the information was translated into these visuals through an open source programming called Processing.
The artist was highly successful in effectively displaying and color coding flights depending on each different type of flight. In contrast with the dark background, these bright colors also depict the relationship between humans and the technology we rely on. The way these pathways all come together to form a broad shape of the US is really powerful in communicating to viewers that we are systematically a part of this process of air travel.