"Inferno" (2020) by Giovanni Muzio

INFERNO is a dramatic journey through the blazes around the globe to raise awareness about forest fires, not only in the Amazon but, for many reasons, across the globe. An audiovisual performance coded live, fetching both archived and real time data of the fires around the world from NASA database and their Near Real Time API. The main performance is coded in the Processing environment, in REPL/Hot Swap mode for changes on the fly without the need to recompile the sketch on each change, and it includes some customizations (GLSL shaders, data fetching algorithms…) and it communicates on the fly with Max/MSP and Ableton Live for the sounds and music.

The video documents the presentation at ICLC 2020 in Limerick, Ireland. Artist website.

Visualising Pi (2014-15) by Ellie Balk and The Green School

This is part of an ongoing collaboration between artist Ellie Balk and high school students in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, USA. The goal is to use "mathematics to connect high school students to the community by painting large-scale murals".

In 2012, students constructed an image of the golden spiral based on the Fibonacci Sequence and began to explore the relationship between the golden ratio and Pi. The number Pi was represented in a color-coded graph within the golden spiral. In this, the numbers are seen as color blocks that vary in size proportionately within the shrinking space of the spiral, allowing us to visualize the shape of Pi and its negative space to look for "patterns". The students soon realized that the irrational number of Pi created no patterns at all, resulting in a space that resembles “noise”.

[In 2014 Pi was visualised] as a reflective line graph that resembles a sound wave. The colors of the mural change at each prime number in Pi so that the viewer can visualize a pattern of prime numbers within Pi. Located on a busy corner in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the sounds of the bustling traffic and rhythmic commuter passing creates the perfect backdrop for our visualization.

website

Notabilia: Visualizing Deletion Discussions on Wikipedia (2010)

Like a garden, an online encyclopedia needs constant weeding. Unlike a garden, an online encyclopedia has thousands of potential gardeners. Over years Wikipedia has developed guidelines and policies to help editors collectively decide whether topics are suitable for inclusion or not. All articles, especially new ones, are reviewed by the community to determine if they meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines. Any editor can nominate an article for deletion and, if this nomination is legitimate, a community discussion takes place where any fellow gardeners editors have the opportunity to make their voices heard. The usual process is to have a week-long discussion during which community members can discuss in favor or against keeping the article. At the end of this period an administrator reviews the discussion and speaks the final verdict.

We analyzed and visualized Article for Deletion (AfD) discussions in the English Wikipedia. The visualization above represents the 100 longest discussions that resulted in the deletion of the respective article. AfD discussions are represented by a thread starting at the bottom center. Each time a user joins an AfD discussion and recommends to keep, merge, or redirect the article a green segment leaning towards the left is added. Each time a user recommends to delete the article a red segment leaning towards the right is added. As the discussion progresses, the length of the segments as well as the angle slowly decay.


Visit Notabilia.

This project is a collaboration between Dario Taraborelli, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia (data and analysis), and Moritz Stefaner (visualization).

"cf. city flows" (2016) by Till Nagel and Christopher Pietsch

cf. city flows is a comparative visualization environment of urban bike mobility designed to help citizens casually analyze three bike-sharing systems in the context of a public exhibition space. Three high-resolution screens show the space of flows of New York City, Berlin, and London through visualizing bike journeys. With our visualizations we want to understand the pulse of urban mobility, and create portraits of a city defined by its transient dynamics.

cf. city flows is an installation comprising multiple visualizations of bike-sharing journeys in three cities combining established mapping and visualization techniques within a highly aestheticized form in order to attract visitors to engage with urban mobility.

website

"Imagined Time" by Laurie Frick

 

Imagined Time is a series of panels made with handmade paper, based on memory and experience of time.

Data is like plastic, incredibly useful and horrible at the same time. In the past decade we’ve gone from being mostly anonymous to almost constantly tracked. Data surrounds us and follows us around. I use rigorous methods to capture, analyze and tell a story with data. My work attempts to explain and anticipate a world of pervasive data through large hand-made patterned wall installations. To contrast a cold and polished computer aesthetic, I use warmer, more familiar materials like wood, paper, wool, leather and glass. I believe the physicality of data and hand-built patterns will let us read and understand what our bodies and behavior tell us. Numeric data are abstract concepts, as humans we simply can’t make sense of large numbers, but we do have an ability to understand pattern - especially colorful pattern intuitively.

Laurie Frick

"Carbon Crisis Blipverts #4 - Aviation" by D-Fuse

Carbon Crisis Blipverts is a series of five 40 second animations exploring aspects of global warming issues. Commissioned by SOS/Live Earth and endorsed by Al Gore, each blipvert focuses on a cause of CO2 emissions - Cars, Rubbish, Aviation, Deforestation, and Electricity consumption.

D-Fuse website

Massive Attack live visuals (UVA)

Above is a short promotion for a Massive Attack tour that shows some of their live visuals, designed by United Visual Artists. While these are not reactive to the music as such, the system can be configured on the fly. On some tours the contents have been changed for each gig, to adapt to the local language and political scene.

"The #Menuverse" by Wilfried Houjebek

Simple maps of the Menuverse: it shows menu-pages (blue dots) and their dishes (white dots). As the numbers grow the Menuverse becomes more nebulous and interconnected, no dish is alone.

website

"Languages in the World" visualisation by Puff Puff Team

The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of 55 authors (many of them the leading authorities on the subject).

Various means of mapping languages are on display at this website developed through a Density Design (Milan) course.

London Underground (1933) by Harry Beck

Prior to Beck, railway maps emphasised distance and geographical accuracy. Draughtsman Harry Beck decided instead to base the his Tube map on circuit diagrams, simplifying the representation and emphasising the stations where lines intersected. Thhe publicity department initially rejected this approach as too radical, but a trial run proved its success. This approach has since become the standard for all underground maps.

"Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East" (1858) by Florence Nightingale

This polar area diagram was published by Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) in Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army. It displays the number of deaths in three categories: preventable diseases (blue), wounds (red), and other causes (black). Sent to Queen Victoria, this publication was designed to improve medical practice in the field.

Florence Nightingale exhibited a gift for mathematics from an early age and excelled in the subject under the tutelage of her father. Later, Nightingale became a pioneer in the visual presentation of information and statistical graphics. She used methods such as the pie chart, which had first been developed by William Playfair in 1801. While taken for granted now, it was at the time a relatively novel method of presenting data.

Indeed, Nightingale is described as "a true pioneer in the graphical representation of statistics", and is credited with developing a form of the pie chart now known as the polar area diagram, or occasionally the Nightingale rose diagram, equivalent to a modern circular histogram, to illustrate seasonal sources of patient mortality in the military field hospital she managed. Nightingale called a compilation of such diagrams a "coxcomb", but later that term would frequently be used for the individual diagrams. She made extensive use of coxcombs to present reports on the nature and magnitude of the conditions of medical care in the Crimean War to Members of Parliament and civil servants who would have been unlikely to read or understand traditional statistical reports. In 1859, Nightingale was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society. In 1874 she became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.

Information from Wikipedia.

Hugh Small's article "Florence Nightingale's Statistical Diagrams" is also available.

"Wind and Words" (2016) by Impossible Bureau

This is a visualisation of the entire dialogue of HBO's Game of Thrones, allowing users to explore the interactions of characters across seasons.

Visit and read more.

Gravity says hello

Gravitational waves from inflation generate a faint but distinctive twisting pattern in the polarization of the CMB, known as a "curl" or B-mode pattern. For the density fluctuations that generate most of the polarization of the CMB, this part of the primordial pattern is exactly zero. Shown here is the actual B-mode pattern observed with the BICEP2 telescope, with the line segments showing the polarization from different spots on the sky. The red and blue shading shows the degree of clockwise and anti-clockwise twisting of this B-mode pattern.

The BICEP and Keck Array CMB Experiments have an entire website dedicated to the discovery of gravity waves. It includes images like this, of interest to anyone intrigued by the aesthetics of scientific images.

Or perhaps you can sonify their data?

Or make from this a video game?

See Something Say Something (2011) by Eric Fischer

Eric Fischer creates maps using geotagged data from public sources. Here a map of San Francisco is formed by plotting the locations of Flickr pictures (red), Twitter tweets (blue), or both (white). What's interesting is that no underlying map outlines are used. The data itself is the map.

If you click through the link, you will see that readers have had fun highlighting areas they recognise, an example of leveraging a built-in Flickr feature to perform interactivity.

The title comes from the phrase promoted by the US Dept. of Homeland Security here.

Scottish election graphics (2016) by Carlo Zapponi

This interactive graphic was produced for an article in The Guardian. It demonstrates how Scotland’s political geography changed, seat by seat, across several elections. Each graph is placed in approximate geographical proximity, so that overall a map of Scotland is (roughly) formed.

This is a Sankey diagram, a type of flow diagram that portrays flow or transfer (of energy, money, goods, etc.) with proportional arrow widths.

Flowing Data (website)

Flowing Data is Nathan Yau's visualisation blog, with many great examples.

CODE_n (2014) by Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram

As a means of designing an exhibition architecture that explores the vast complexity of Big Data, the theme of the 2014 CODE_n conference, KRAM/WEISSHAAR culled and combined data sets from a vast range of sources—from Google Lab's annals of digitized books, to oceanic data and the morphological paths of the human mind—to create a giant 260 meter long print that envelopes and frees the exhibition space.

The exhibition architecture was designed to act as both a metaphor for Big Data and a means to inspire new conversations and ideas at the CODE_n conference, in which 50 start-ups from 17 countries offered innovative, new business concepts harnessing the potential uses of Big Data.

KRAM/WEISSHAAR designed a custom code in order to plot massive amounts of data to create the imagery which visualizes systems beyond human perception on a series of spectacular curving canvases. Contemporary data-driven innovation is represented and visualised as a massive repository of human culture and activity, able to tackle and articulate the complexity, breadth and depth of the information available within virtual spaces.

For the 260 meter-long terapixel graphics, data sets depicting the neural pathways of the human mind, the constant flux of information we receive from datapoints across the world’s oceans, and the evolution of language across four billion books from the past 200 years were projected upon a giant, filleted panorama.

website

"Homophily: The Urban History of an Algorithm" (2019)

Research by Laura Kurgan, Dare Brawley, Brian House, Jia Zhang, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun available here.

The word "homophily" was coined in a highly-cited 1954 essay by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton on friendship in a mixed-race housing project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The researchers were suspicious of the "familiar and egregiously misleading question: do birds of a feather flock together?"

They focused on "racial attitudes," and concluded that friendships form and persist not simply on the basis of shared identities but also thanks to shared values and beliefs.

They imagined two possible social phenomena: "a tendency for friendships to form between those who are alike in some designated respect," which they termed homophily, and a countervailing pattern, "a tendency for friendships to form between those who differ in some designated respect," termed heterophily.

The axes of likeness, they hypothesized, could run along lines of "status" (race, educational level, gender, etc) or "values or opinions."

The values that Merton and Lazarsfeld studied in Pittsburgh were not randomly chosen. It is not surprising that the issue of integration would be divisive and a deciding factor for friendships in a mixed-race housing project in 1947. Yet it is an irony of history that this highly contextually and historically specific empirical observation has subsequently been taken as a law of human behavior. The irony is further complicated by the fact that Merton and Lazarfeld never actually published the report and data from which their construction of homophily emerged, which would have complicated the simple uptake of homophily.

related exhibition

A Disappearing Planet (2013) by Anna Flagg

Animal species are going extinct anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times the rates that would be expected under natural conditions. According to Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction and other recent studies, the increase results from a variety of human-caused effects including climate change, habitat destruction, and species displacement. Today's extinction rates rival those during the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Interactive website contains visualisations.

Species data from the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Design & Development by Lena Groeger and Sisi Wei.

The United States mapped by trees and forests (2017) by EarthArtAustralia

The United States mapped by the beautiful natural patterns of over 1000 million acres of trees & forests!

Map created with open-source QGIS (http://www.qgis.org/en/site/), using data from Hansen et al. 2013 (http://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest) and 90m digital elevation data from the CGIAR-CSI SRTM 90m Database (http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org)

source