Ammar Hassonjee – Looking Outwards 09

For this Looking Outwards project, I chose to focus on my classmate Jai Sawkar’s Looking Outwards 07 post. In this post, he talks about a project called Phantom Terrains created by Frank Swain and Daniel Jones which is an abstract representation of the data streams around us and is an attempt to visualize the invisible flows of data that run from our devices to routers back to our devices. The algorithm that drives Phantom Terrains works by having wireless data streams be transferred to a hearing aid, which then interprets the data flows as audio representations and sound signals. The sound signals can then be visualized as a topographic like map then.

I agree with Jai’s point that the project is very interesting in that it’s a compelling graphic that visualizes something we might not necessarily be able to see. In fact, it requires us to use our other senses of hearing to create a graphical information representation. The link to the website can be found here.