LookingOutwards-07 – Page 2 – [OLD SEMESTER] 15-104 • Introduction to Computing for Creative Practice

Looking Outwards 07

Wind Map.

I find this project extremely intriguing because of the many uses it provides that even the creators themselves have not anticipated. The Wind Map, created by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, shows real time wind data that comes from the National Digital Forecast Database. The technique includes using “comet-like trails to show motion”, and is derived from Edmund Halley in 1686. The project itself is entirely implemented in HTML and JavaScript.

The creators intended this project to be an emotional approach and artistic exploration that shows people where and when hurricanes and wind storms happen. I think it is fascinating that such a beautifully crafted project is constantly updating so people can relate and send hopes to areas with dangerous wind activity. The aesthetics of this project are extremely captivating: during times when the wind is calm, the make also looks serene and meditative. However, when there are severe hurricanes, large white strokes illustrate very scary movement that resembles lightning and chaos.

Furthermore, I am more fascinated that people have found unique ways to utilize this map. For example, bird watchers have used it to examine bird migration and cyclist have used it to plan for their trips. The use of a project like this can vary from the research level (ex. Architects studying site conditions), to a local or personal level (ex. Planning for a family trip). This is extremely captivating for me.

Fernanda Viégas

Rhythm of food

The project I choose is about visualizing several food searches on the Internet. The designer Moritz Stefaner investigates how people change preferences for particular food over months and years and how it creates a rhythm to showcase the seasonality of food queries. I love how they investigate this topic from many aspects, such as among different countries, different food, or different time.

Stefaner also puts a lot of effort into visualizing how food queries change monthly and yearly. He designed a circle with bars surrounding it clockwise to show different months. Each bar represents the number of times a keyword is searched. After that, he overlayed bars on one another with different colors across different years. Furthermore, he creates an animation to visualize the process more clearly. The rigidity in the structure of the data and clarity in its presentation makes me admire his effort.

Finally, Stefaner also provides clues to help the audience understand patterns in data. For example, in months with holidays like Halloween and Christmas. He puts a marker on that day in the graph to show how the frequency of food searches might change around that day.

Blog – 07

The work of Jonathan Jennings Harris most inspires me. He is an artist and technologist who often works with data. One piece of work that I found particularly interesting was “I Want You To Want Me” which he created in 2008. It is an interactive portrait illustrating the search for love(and self) through online dating. In this project, Harris and his team gathered data from hundreds of dating sites and displayed them in a series of interactive ways. On a touchscreen panel, many balloons are displayed in various colors. Pink for women and blue for men. The balloons also vary in value, with younger people having lighter-colored balloons and older people having darker-colored balloons. Inside the balloons lie animated silhouettes of people trapped inside looking for love. These balloons are then algorithmically matched on the screen based on what people said in their profiles. The user is able to click on a balloon to learn more about each person.

https://jjh.org

Looking Outwards 07: Computational Information Visualization

To better understand Computational Information Visualization, I looked into the Visual Earth project led by Dr. Lev Manovich. It’s a really cool project that compiles data about images and photographs on the internet on a visual map of the earth in order to understand global growth trends better, and how our visually heavy spaces online vary geographically in relation to various factors like economic and cultural differences. They compute this by using images from Twitter that have the locations tagged. However, they mention only processing a part of the total data set they collect (100 out of 270 million) which is done through a random process much like the ‘random’ function in p5.js. The visual form of processing and communicating this massive amount of information is really useful in allowing people to visually process different rates of image sharing as they are influenced by things like income or even geographical landscape.

https://visual-earth.net/

looking outwards-07

Ben Fry – Mario Soup/All Streets

This work immediately intrigued me because of its nostalgic draw, but the arrangement and presentation itself make it become a truly standalone artwork. The method of extracting data that Ben Fry uses throughout his work really made me think about how data, in itself, doesn’t really mean anything unless assigned to a certain context or presentation. For example, All Streets is about the concentration and representation of roads in the USA on a map; however, the actual illustration of the data combined with the contextualization of what that data represents geographically, which is in constant engagement with how audiences interact with the map when making sense of it in their intersubjective interpretation of the map (what they call home, what they’ve assumed borders were, what they’ve assumed population/road densities were in certain places).

Thus, in Mario Soup, this method becomes even more meta. The data itself that was specifically made for art is revealed to the audience to be nothing more than pixels of color themselves by the reorganization of that data. Especially interesting is that this was how the data was arranged by the programmers of the game for the utility of the game itself, so utility organization has been flipped on its head as an aesthetic itself when was supposed to be the means of a different aesthetic–that for a game. This was done by decoding the raw data of a Nintendo game cartridge as a four-color image, according to Fry.

https://benfry.com/mariosoup/

LO 07: The codex Atlanticus: Decoding Leonardo Da Vinci for the world by The Visual Agency, Italy

Codex-Atlanticus.it – A new light on Leonardo da Vinci's greatest work from The Visual Agency on Vimeo.

The codex Atlanticus is a digital collection of drawings and texts by Leonardo da Vinci which is a part of the original collection at Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. The creators of this digital archive have utilized data for storytelling and visualize information through various filters with which the user can unravel information of a particular document, beyond what is specified in it. The most interesting part is how the interface works and interacts with the user through visualized data. One would be more informed of the archival material going through this digital interface.

Links:

https://thevisualagency.com/works/decoding-leonardo-da-vinci-for-the-world/

Blog 07

For this week’s blog about information visualization, I found the work by the Stamen Studio very compelling, especially the “OneBayArea Map” that mapps transit ranges around the entire bay area in one program. Besides the eye-catching and interactive homepage, their works include very strategic methods of making useful maps that get straight to the point without sacrificing information. The “OneBayArea Map” not only lets commuters understand commute time and distance, it directly relates this information with housing prices, helpful for homebuyers to find ideal homes to commute from. Moreover, it also encourages commuting methods like bussing, biking, and walking by showing how little time they actually take in some cases, comparable to single person vehicles. It also suggests concepts relating to socioeconomic status and access to public transportation systems. To do so, I think this project includes layering many different types of maps and consolidating the data of these, which is then transferred into codes to revisualize these data into an interactive map. The map’s aesthetics not only generates a nice looking program, but it also creates simplicity and clarity that is very important to an info-packed map.

https://stamen.com/work/onebayarea/

Looking Outwards 07: Information Visualization

The interactive light structure, Unnumbered Sparks (2014), by Aaron Koblin and Janet Echelman was truly something spectacular to see. The concept itself—of a massive light structure that changed depending on real time audience interaction—promoted this lovely theme of unity and creativity in a very beautiful and meaningful way. The way it was constructed was also very artistic and elegant, and it was clear that Koblin and Echelman’s artistic touches could be seen through the color palettes as well as the delicate way the light filaments interacted with one another to create a stunning night sky display. In addition, the way the project was structured meant it relied heavily on focus and distance, something that the artists needed to balance in order to create something visually appealing. The algorithms involved appeared to have taken in people’s data from their phones and mapped it to some value that would allow it to alter the way the lights in the structure appeared, whether in color or shape. The way it was produced was through the usage of a website, distributed and projected onto a real, physical structure.

Link here

LO 7: Visualizing Information

I looked at the project about Flight Patterns that represent visual information. This project plots flight patterns throughout the US visually using colors and lines. It was created as an experimental project for “Celestial Mechanics” by Scott Hessles and Gabriel Dunne at UCLA. I find this visual data intriguing because flight patterns are not something explicitly visual so it’s interesting to see what areas and cities have the most air traffic which is visually represented in this project as varying colors of lines with lighter lines as more trafficked areas. when zooming into a specific city the data is detailed enough to see the specific flight patterns within the city itself. The algorithm was developed with data that is processed through the Processing program which plots out the lines visually.

website link

Looking Outwards 07: Information Visualization

I chose to look at Flight Patterns by Aaron Koblin. This visualization of the flight data over North America was interesting to me because of how non-geometric it is. The closer you zoom into the maps, the more mycelial the shape of the flight paths become. I think we commonly believe that planes move from point A to point B along a straight line, but as we look at this map, it’s clear that that image is incorrect. I think for me it’s the mycelial nature of these flight paths, having nexuses and crisscrossing to create this intricate web that I find really intriguing. Such nonlinear patterns replete with random elements always fascinate me. The algorithms seem fairly simple and easy to understand. A flight path is charted from its beginning to its end, its x and y coordinates (latitude and longitude) mapped out using point based lines. It’s just an interesting exploration of randomness to me.