As the final revision to the yahoo weather XML assignment, I thought it appropriate to place it within more of a spatial context, moving the whole frame back into space and letting the information interact with the blinds by having the text be enveloped by the movement.

Weather Data Visualization from Angela Chen on Vimeo.

military expenditures visualized as a familiar video game.  The size of the explosion is directly proportional to the amount of money spent, in millions of dollars.

the “bad” data visualizations that we are starting off with:

(1) NYC waste

(2) Military expenditures

(3) topographical map

GAME PLAN

I’m wondering if this week’s assignment, to “decompose” an image by mapping its RGB values to an XYZ-axis, has anything to do with halloween, but I’ll settle for any references of the ‘hood as being the final frontier…

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After also taking a closer look at the work of Aaron Koblin and Karsten Schmidt, I’m encouraged and inspired to think that there are still so many varied and creative ways of expressing data, but more so, ideas.  I appreciated how these artists are using tools like Processing and other new technologies to keep pushing the envelope in an elegant, clever way.  One of the things I am attracted to about Aaron’s work, is the impression that his pieces don’t get caught up in the complexities of programming towards expressing what may be a simple but striking concept.  In other words, using Processing, LIDAR, Maya, After Effects, etc. doesn’t become the thing that drives the work, but rather its things like audience participation and the beauty of the results.  Though I first heard of his work from the Radiohead music video, I think some of my more favorites pieces are ones like The Sheep Market and Bicycle Built for Two Thousand.  The idiosyncrasies of which I feel bely the complexities of human nature and our ever-changing relationship with new media.  I think there is room to take these pieces even further.  And if I had the chance, I might introduce more factors into the equation.  For example with Sheep Market, it might be interesting to have the participant also choose a word to describe his/her sheep or maybe just for kicks, analyze people’s sheep using a Bob Ross -0-meter, to assess an arbitrary drawing scale.

I recognized most of the work on www.postspectacular.com through toxi.co.uk as well as the collaboration work Karsten Schmidt did with Universal Everything.  I can’t help but be blown away by the breadth and strength of the work in its entirety.  The manifesto was interesting to read because i tend to believe that manifestos can sometimes be limiting rather than liberating, but he does put the disclaimer in the beginning that it is in a “constant state of flux”.  In comparison to Koblin, his design methodology is more refined in the respect that his creativity is more of a process.  Whether its figuring out a new technology or problem solving through learning and research, I think there is a maturity to his approach in the way that he has learned from experience what kinds of outcome to expect when working with other people and how letting in other influences can also affect the work in your own process.  His interview on Vimeo also had some relevant points, but I could see how some people (particularly graphic designers) would disagree over the bit about the Jesse McMullin Design Manifesto Continuum as the realm of “style” being the main concern of graphic designers.  I’m only harping on these points mainly though because his work, no matter what manifesto drives it, speaks of having depth and meaning, far beyond making pretty images or design objects.  Moreover, I think Karsten is a great example of the blending of technology and craft and his work is a great retort to those who would denounce generative art and design as generic and lacking any sense of true originality.

]]> http://s-p-r-a-w-l.com/blog/2009/10/29/decomposing-images/feed/ 0 http://s-p-r-a-w-l.com/blog/2009/10/16/blind-to-the-weather/ http://s-p-r-a-w-l.com/blog/2009/10/16/blind-to-the-weather/#comments Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:53:41 +0000 admin http://s-p-r-a-w-l.com/blog/?p=845 The last visualizing data assignment was parsing the XML from the Yahoo RSS feed using two data sets and two colors.

Since my usual gauge for weather consists of me looking out a window and taking an educated guess, i wanted to create something that would emulate window blinds that were moving in a weather vane like movement.  I chose to visualize the relationship between temperature and wind speed by setting the wind speed equal to the rotational speed of my blinds and mapping the color of the blinds from blue (coldest) to red (hottest) using an HSB colormode.  It doesn’t run well on the browser, but click here to download source code.