Previous / Next image (1 of 5) Title and artists I DO NOT LOVE NYC code generated video: Tibor Fabian audio: Autobam Location Macy Gallery, 444 Macy Hall, Teachers College, Columbia University 525 West 120th Street New York, NY 10027 November 2 – November 13 2009, 10 am – 6 pm, Mon – Fri more info at: www.visionsinnyc.com Links http://www.artapartofculture.org/2009/11/02/visions-in-new-york-city

Previous / Next image (1 of 7) purpose Building ad emotional approach to Ducati MTS with its four drive modes.. concept XML based rich internet application with non-linear streaming of edited footage tech Final Cut Pro + Flash CS4 Actionscript3 client Made in collaboration with Develon for Ducati Sound design: Autobam

Previous / Next image (1 of 6) purpose Making a smart and captivating webplayer for teenagers music TV. The player must manage both archive and daily scheduled programs with adv clips interval capability. concept Fullscreen application with sliding parts. The interface allows to navigate through three levels and different functionality with extreme ease and directness. tech Flex application with Flash designed components, XML synchronization with server and progressive download (no media server required) client Made in collaboration with Develon for Teamworld

Previous / Next image (1 of 3) purpose Logo design for identity concept Processing the Helvetica typeface with subsequent expansions and compressions of outlines tech Expand Fill function in Flash client Elec collective

Previous / Next image (1 of 14) purpose Giving information about current exhibition and events. Collecting subscriptions for new memberships. concept Mixed media application running in a totem with touchscreen monitor. The interface allows users exploring exhibition paintings and their location on Venice map, accessing to events calendar ad subscribe for membership with data connection to Guggenheim web-service. tech Actionscript3 Flex/Flash application client Made in collaboration with AD Comunicazione for Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Previous / Next image (1 of 7) purpose Building ad emotional approach to Ducati Streetfighter and its technical specs. concept XML based rich internet application with a 360° view of the motorcycle in a 3d background, context hilights and video/photographic fullscreen gallery. tech Video compositing between photo shots of the motorcycle and 3D modeled scenery. Flash application for 3D vector superimposition, 360° rotation control and gallery navigation. client Made in collaboration with Develon for Ducati 3D enviroment and compositing: Igor Imhoff Sound design: Autobam

Previous / Next image (1 of 4) purpose Animating the logo (an U shape filled by a flow of random colored squares) and building a website in it. concept XML based Flash website. tech Actionscript3 client Graphic design by Oliviero Toscani. Made in collaboration with Faber Advertising for LaSterpaia

I am Tibor Fabian, freelance media designer based in Venice. I design and build internet and stand-alone applications. I'm deeply skilled in Actionscript3 in Adobe Flash CS4, Flex Builder / Air and mobile (iPhone) integration. It all started in 1976 with a Philips recorder and later with a Commodore 64. Over years i've developed a passion for both audio and visual creation/processing using digital machines, above all: coding. Contacts tibor.fabian@gmail.com skype: molecole mobile phone: +39 348 3649772 Publishing 2008: "Audio/Video, nuove frontiere" - Interview for Sound magazine 2006: "I DO NOT LOVE NYC" - Videoclip broadcasting on MTV Network (Qoob TV) 2005: "Elec e gli algoritmi armonici" - Interview for Digimag webzine Awards maj 08 2007 : Elettrowave Challenge (1st prize for Live Performance) - Milano - Roma - Firenze maj 03 2003 : Italian Web Awards (1st prize for Animation) - Francavilla al Mare
 jul 08 2002 : Interactive Key Award - Teatro Nuovo - Milano (nomination for ICT) Exhibitions dec 2009: Visions in New York City - Art Basel Miami, Verge Fair. nov 2009 : Visions in New York City - Teachers College, Columbia University - NY june 2007 : NIME 07 - Galapagos Art Space – Brooklyn - NY mar 2007 : Optronica - Visual Music On The Big Screen - London nov 2006 : Screen Music Fest - Fortezza da Basso - Firenze july 2006 : Italia Wave Love Festival – Elettrowave - Florence april 2006 : Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa - Venice sept 2006 : Space And Empty - Teatro Junghans - Venice nov 2006 : Tomorrow Now - Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa – Venice june 2006 : Fabbrika - Vicenza june 2006 : Mixed Media Festival - La Città Del Teatro - Cascina (Pisa) may 2006 : LAT - IUAV Tolentini - Faculty of Architecture - Venice may 2006 : Architetture Urbane - Space and art festival – Padova may 2005 : SSF - Parco Fistomba - Padova april 2005 : Multicode - Galleria A+A – Venezia nov 2004 : Elettropiù - Firenze dec 2003 : Sintesi - Museo La Ruota Degli Espositi – Napoli dec 2003 : Cartoombria - Auditorium Santa Cecilia - Perugia oct 2003 : Italian Live Media - Ex Bologna Motori - Bologna sept 2003 : Videominuto - Anfiteatro Museo Pecci – Prato maj 2003 : Base x Altezza - Fuoricentro - Livorno maj 2003 : Peam 2003 - Ecoteca - Pescara maj 2003 : Intersezioni - Interzona – Verona apr 2003 : 72ore - Parco Delle Cascine - Firenze feb 2003 : V_ - Deposito Bulk - Milano jan 2003 : Eyes Club - Padova jan 2003 : Automaten Bar - Berlin dec 2002: Transcodex1 - Centro Petralata - Roma dec 2002 : Batofar - Paris oct 2002 : Poliphonix 40 - Centre Pompidou - Paris sept 2002 : Videominuto - Museo Pecci - Prato dec 2002 : Napoli Film Festival - Napoli oct 2002 : Italian LIve Media Contest - Istituto Europeo di Design – Milano maj 2002 : EclipCity 2 - Incontri Internazionali di Architettura – Firenze apr 2002 : Sintesi - Electronic Art Festival - Napoli dec 2001 : Incontri Arte Animazione - Galleria d'Arte Moderna - Torino jul 2001 : Biennale Giovani Artisti – Sarajevo

Eric Fischer took publicly available data from the Muni ? San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency ? showing the geographic coordinates of their vehicles to create this map showing average transit speeds over a 24-hour period. Muni is one of America?s oldest public transit agencies and today carries over 200 million customers per year in 80 routes throughout the city and county of San Francisco.

Black lines represent very slow movement under 7 mph. Red are less than 19 mph. Blue are less than 43 mph. Green lines depict faster speeds above 43 mph.

Eric Fischer is also the author of the remarkable Geotaggers' World Atlas.

The goal of this project is to question the top-down categorization and evaluation of music by the music industry and its sales charts by using Twitter as an alternative ranking system.

Authors tracked the number of times a song was quoted in Twitter messages as an indicator of its 'ratings' in the world in order to create a parallel rating system. As the authors explain, these new 'music charts' could give us a more accurate insight into the perceived 'value' of the song. These 'grassroot' charts are based on the influence of songs on people?s everyday lives, on the real emotions they evoke, and on the associations they create in people?s minds, unlike official music industry charts that are primarily based on album sales and the commercial success of the artist.

This radial visualization (part of a larger set of visual components) shows Twitter user activity around popular song titles.

This work constitutes several visual experiments that map the GPS coordinates and velocity of 1534 vehicles circulating in Lisbon, Portugal, during October 2009. That information is condensed in one single virtual day, grouping the data by second and displaying it as an animation.

The white dots are the circulating vehicles at that moment. The trails of the vehicles group themselves into main arteries where the thickness represents traffic intensity. Each trail constitutes a temporary route where the average speed is mapped to its color. Pure green represents average speeds of 60 km/h. Therefore cooler and greenish hues traduce rapid transit arteries, while the sluggish ones are reddish and hotter. There is a visual emphasis on the slower areas, with hot colors traducing sluggish traffic.

These images are part of a large collection of fifty city maps tracing geotagged photos from Flickr and Picasa. Eric Fischer determined the speed at which photographers travelled the various urban landscapes by analyzing their photos' timestamps and geotags, and plotting them on an OpenStreetMap background layer. The maps are ordered by the number of pictures taken in the central cluster of each city, and include various metropolises like New York, London, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, Berlin, Rome, Barcelona, Vancouver, and Hong Kong.

The first map is from the city of London and the second from San Francisco.

I first saw this project on the Show me the Data event in May 2010. Organized by Marcel Worring, Raul Ni�o Zambrano, and Yuri Engelhardt, this marked the public presentation of nine multidisciplinary data visualization projects developed by Master students of the University of Amsterdam and the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design. The invited lecturers, Daniel Aguilar (Bestiario), Erik-Jan van der Linden (MagnaView), and myself, symbolically nominated this the winning project due to its in-depth multivariate analysis.

Using data from the CIA World Factbook, this interactive application tracks the commercial ties between most countries across the globe, allowing for a variety of comparisons and insights. The system is developed for a webkit browser so it will work better in Chrome or Safari.

Xiaoji Chen is a 1st year SMArchS student in Design and Computation at MIT. As part of her work in the SENSEable City's workshop, Xiaoji developed a series of maps of the city of Paris, where the distance between a spot and the city center is not proportional to their geographical distance, but to the cost it takes to get there.

One of her interesting comparisons maps several means of transport within the city of Paris according to the amount of released CO2 (kg). According to Xiaoji this approach is an appealing alternative to the mobile version of Goggle Maps.

Most Americans know that the US government spends an insane amount of their tax dollars on defense, but how do you show just how much they spend compared to all other areas in the country? In order to answer this query the authors created a visualization mapping federal spending against media coverage. They wanted to use a minimal approach with no labeling necessary. The design says it all and shows what almost 70% of a budget going to defense looks like compared to all other departments (Education gets around 1%).

The authors used the New York Times API to parse through all articles written in 2009. Using key words that dealth with characteristics of each governmental agency, they displayed their frequency usage in comparison with one another. The colors on the right rings are representative of their colors from the left. What we see is that all of the much less-budgeted agencies from the left ring are discussed far more in the news. The Department of Health and Humand Services, which was a major issue of discussion in 2009 with health care reform being heatly debated only accounts for about 4% of the US federal budget, though it's the most discussed issue in the media.

Everyday our mailboxes are flooded with unsolicited offers of porn material, pirate software, viagra, illegal financial services and advice on women seduction. A quick glance at the spam mailbox always provides fresh inspiration: bizarre subjects guides us in the quest for the definitive answer to fundamental human problems. But the crisis is striking and we must recycle.

Instead of sweeping spam under the carpet, the authors of SpamGhetto decided to save some junk-mail in order to turn it into a wallpaper before it's too late, since as they proclaim "someday a brilliant scientist will find the definitive solution to eradicate from the web the bittersweet pleasure of spam".

If you provide them with your room's dimensions, they can produce a SpamGhetto design wrapping and folding around shapes and objects on your wall's surface.

Since the terroristic attack on the World Trade Center on september 11th, 2001, and the following invasion by the Allied forces in Afghanistan in order to fight the Taliban regime and Al-Quaida, the Western countries are involved in an ongoing conflict which seems to have no end.

When the authors started researching this topic they realized that the debate whether to pull out the troops, staying, or even reinforcing, is not so much about arguments, it's a battle of possible scenarios. Every side seems to have their own positive and negative visions of how things will happen in the future if certain steps are achieved. The resulting map The Afghan Conflict - A Map of Possible Scenarios is an attempt to summarize possible scenarios around the afghan conflict, according to a pullout or stay of the Allied troops. And is based on interviews with journalists, politicians and political foundations.

Commissioned by the Design Museum, Poke developed an animated map charting the history of digital design in London. It maps the growth, death and merging of main design agencies in the city of London from 1994 to 2009.

As Poke explains: "The digital design industry is the very epitome of rapid change, so we decided to make an interactive, time-based map. This allowed us to demonstrate that speed, as well as show off the advantages of a digital approach. The creation of a map also meant we could chronicle the geographical movement across the capital, triggered by a high rate of agency mergers, acquisitions and deaths, in a visually commanding way."

Architect Jorge Ayala is based between London, Beijing and Paris working for Plasma Studio on several projects within China, and currently involved in the World Horticultural Expo design for Xi'an 2011. He continuously showcases an interesting array of ideas and projects on his blog.

The model shown here, in a laser cutted 1 mm white cardboard shaped by hand, consists of a mesh of densities within an urban framework that seeks to understand, articulate, and visualize possibilities for the hyper dense, programmatic difference, and radically optimized new agglomerations in China.

As Jorge explains, "The usage of the graphic material and selection of processes help the project to move from a fundamental constraint 2D drawing, which delimitate boundaries, into a more propositional engagement with its context."

RAMA is a prototype web-based application for visualizing and interacting with networks of music artists. It uses data of roughly 200,000 artists and 3 million tags, collected from Last.fm's API. Data includes artists similarities, associated tags and popularity.

RAMA provides two simultaneous layers of information: (1) a graph built from artist similarity data, modeled as a physical system representing nodes as negatively charged particles and edges as springs; (2) overlaid labels containing user-defined tags.

A number of different features aim at providing enhanced browsing experiences to users: RAMA emphasizes commonalities as well as main differences between artists, and users can interact with the graph in different ways. Optionally, users can edit graphs manually, removing some artists and expanding artist's neighbors.

TweetCatcha seeks to uncover the organic nature of news as it travels through Twitter over time, by examining the movement of NY Times articles through Twitter.

The New York Times Newswire API is used to load news for the last 24 hours. The title and URL for the retrieved articles are used to search for tweets with the BackTweets API, a BackType service.

The articles are placed around the center arranged clockwise based on the time they were published. The tweets for each article emanate from the article near the center to the outside. These are based on the time difference between when the article was published and when it was tweeted. The 24 rings indicate the hour difference from 1 near the center to 24 near the outside.

Data was collected between November 13, 2009 and February 9, 2010 via a cron job set up to pull and store the data locally. The current database is 107 MB, with 15,327 NYTimes articles and 311,885 tweets for those articles.

This visualization represents the 140 MPhil and PhD research students at the Royal College of Art, and their relationships to funding agencies and institutional partners. Research RCA commissioned the visualization as a large-format poster for its 2009 exhibition, as well as a condensed version for the exhibition catalogue.

The typographically-driven approach resulted in a functional piece (i.e. with little need for a legend) in a visual language well suited to a university of art and design. The design process exploited the diversity of forms within Lineto's Akkurat and Hoefler & Frere-Jones' Didot typefaces to differentiate between the kinds of information chosen to represent each student: School - Department - Degree_Type (Time) - Name (Nationality). The fonts work in partnership with differences in the text content itself resulting in clusters and patterns that bind like with like. Students' nationalities were further represented as relative distances (see lines before student name) between their home country's capital city and London.

The 140 students were differentiated from 52 funding agencies and institutional partners by typesetting the latter in Didot caps and reversing the direction of the text. The connection lines running from these to the students show striking concentration from a few notable sources including the Arts and Humanities Research Council, RCA itself (which funds many of its students), and partnerships with the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Ever wonder where your dollar bills travel after you plop them down for a cup of coffee? The Web site Where's George? allows you to do just that: Record your bill's serial number and then track its journeys as other people spend it across the country. But it's more than just a game. Because every time a dollar is spent in a new place, it means someone moved it there. Christian Thiemann and Daniel Grady of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have been using the Web site's data to study how people move within the United States.

Winners of the NSF/AAAS Visualization Challenge, they produced an engaging video to explain their project and animate the results. Tiny bills stretch out from county to county on a map of the contiguous United States. Some places, such as Los Angeles, California, have many bills passing through it from across the nation, while others, such as Anderson County in Tennessee - Grady's home - have bills circulating mainly within a more local neighborhood. Shown here are images from the video.

The data from the Where's George? project is in fact so pertinent that is also being used by researchers to predict the spread of flu across the United States.

This is an interesting light-weight 3D interface for browsing and building complex linked datasets. The graphical interface extends the ring-shape graph visualization to the 3D domain and it goes through three different configurations, the last of which, as the author explains, could be used for displaying a number of users linked to a certain resource.

The popularization of electronic instruments and computers, allied to the broad and easy reachable information through the internet, enabled the appearance of countless rhythmic structures, giving rise to new styles and sub styles within contemporary electronic music.

Created in Processing, SyncLost is a multi-user immersive installation on the history of electronic music. The project's objective is to create an interface where users can view all the connections between the main styles of electronic music through visual and audible feedback.

When you click on a particular node, all connections are shown - where the style comes from and which had been influenced by it - furthermore the music plays and a representative textual information is displayed. The visual feedback is given in real time, according to the user's choice. The music rhythm serves as a visualization parameter of the style's icon, creating multiple sonorous visualizations. You control the visualization through wiimote controls, while audible feedback is given through wireless headphones.

Software Explorer (SolidSX) is a standalone Windows application that provides insight into large software systems. SolidSX creates visualizations that simultaneously show the structure, dependencies, metrics on all types of source code elements (files, classes, methods, fields, etc.). By using hardware-accelerated graphics, SolidSX is able to display large amounts of information in a concise manner, providing easy exploration through large source codes.

SolidSX comes as a generic structure/dependencies/metrics visualization tool, and can be adapted to any given programing language via importer plugins. These are available for .NET (all languages), Java and Visual C++ (BSC format only).

Comissioned by ArtAids, for the exhibition FROM THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN, Plasma is an interactive network of links and tags that belongs to a ongoing research on the topic of AIDS, from an integral and holistic point of view. Created by Santiago Ortiz and L�a Legrand, the project is still under way and welcoming further collaboration.

This visualization depicts the similarities between 5,000 movies as found by an algorithm used for the Netflix Prize. Movies are represented by dots with adjacent titles. Similar movies, as determined by customer rating patterns, are connected by a line. Colors closer to red indicate a weaker similarity, and colors closer to yellow indicate a stronger similarity. Many similarly-rated movies tend to cluster around topics, themes, directors, or actors. You can see a previous version of the project here.

PostModernNews deconstructs a collection of Twitter messages into a bag-of-words, replacing syntax with a graphic re-arrangement of terms that the reader must re-associate to assert meaning. Users can either enter particular search terms or select one of the expandable categories, e.g., Trends, Celebrities, Editorial, to get started. The interaction with the generated territory allows different behaviors. While some relationships are drawn, others are implied with boundaries, solid or porous, and others only appear when queried with the cursor.

Released by Asterisq, Mentionmap is a web app for exploring your Twitter network. It allows you to discover which people you interact the most and what they're talking about. It's also an interesting way to find relevant people to follow.

The visualization runs in your browser and displays data from the Twitter API. It loads each user's Twitter status updates (tweets) and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. Clicking a user will display their network of mentions as well as details from their profile. The lines drawn between nodes become thicker the more users mention each other. This draws the viewer's attention to potential discussions and interesting debates. Hovering over an edge also reveals the exact number of mentions. You can also search for friends by typing their Twitter usernames into the search box.

The data is displayed using Constellation Framework - a graph visualization library for Actionscript.

Every single Dr Who journey ever. Crowdsourced ultra-geek dataset for The Guardian.

Three firms own 89% of your sugar water.

(Hmmm, this needs a bit of design IMHO. I might have a chop at it)

Research and visualisation by Dr Phil Howard of Michigan State University. He’s done some other, great visual explorations of key industries including organic food and seeds.

Articles of War

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars
data: http://bit.ly/WikiLame

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This week, I was lucky enough to accompany UK Prime Minister’s delegation to India as part of contingent of ‘hackers’ and civic-minded dataheads. We did a hack day with some of India’s leading developers and visualizers.

Check out their great, ingenious work in this post for The Guardian.

Here’s the full bus-heatmap mentioned in the piece.

I was listening to writer Clay Shirky talk about cognitive surplus – the idea of spare brainpower in the world’s collective mind just sitting there waiting, wanting, to be harnessed.

He had a stand-out statistic that snagged my mind. I thought I would visualise it.

Shocking proportion. Interestingly, when I sketched the diagram, my imagination had the scale way wrong.

The Billion Dollar-O-Gram 2009. The latest version of our fabled treemap of billion dollar amounts.

All the data and more billion dollar amounts: http://bit.ly/bndollar

A little context

This image arose out of frustration with media reporting of billion dollar amounts. That is, that they’re meaningless without context. But they’re continually reported as self-evident facts. 500 billion for this war. 50 billion for this pipeline. Literally mind-boggling amounts of money.

So here we’ve scraped reported figures from The New York Times, The Guardian, and other news outlets and visualized them as a treemap (?). So you can see in one place figures that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.

(**Sorry it’s taken me so long to update this image from the original version. I’ve revised and updated all the figures. Sourced some new numbers. And researched new ideas suggested by visitors. Thanks all!**)

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Design duo Tyler Lang and Elsa Chaves are Always With Honor, an Portland-based design team with a specialty in beautifully simple information displays and iconography.

I first got turned on to / by their work when I spotted this awesome poster. It visualizes the many domains within design. Somewhat awesomely.

(Here’s a link to a massive hi-res version)

Simple Is Beautiful

Simple shapes, simple typography, simple colour characterises their work. I snaffled them up for a spread in Information Is Beautiful about the various creation stories across cultures – scientific and mythological.

Struck me there was something cool about trying to visualize such an unimaginably complex process with super-simple graphics.

Iconographtastic

Always With Honor create the best icons! You may have seen some of their work for publications like Monocole. So characterful. More here.

Infographtastic

They also had a strong influence on the look and feel of Good Magazine’s infographic Transparency section. Soft lines and cutsy icons make the data seem less harsh, less griddy. I like!

Colours In Culture

My favourite piece, somewhat selfishly, is the Colours In Culture image on the cover of Information Is Beautiful. It visualizes the meaning of colours across different cultures (Native American, Western, Chinese etc).

Bag yourself a poster

In fact, we’ve just litho-printed a gorgeous poster version of this image on 220 gsm, FSC-certified art paper.

The coolest thing though is that it’s a 6-colour process print. Gold and silver on the diagram have been printed – at great expense – in gold and silver ink. Not only does that look cool. But it also means we’ve been able to remove the legend from the design. Making the image even cleaner and simpler.

Order a copy from our store now.

The first print run is already almost sold out. We have just 25 copies left.

Visit AlwaysWithHonor.com for more beautiful work.

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“Live-vizzing” a graphic on the UK government’s emergency budget for The Guardian and Open Knowledge Foundation.

So much great work out there at the moment, I wanted to share it with y’all.

Sekret Firmy Magazine
Russian infography seems to be on the rise. Here are some great visuals from a publication apparently called ‘Sekret Firmy Magazine“. No idea what it’s about. But my eyes just don’t seem to care.

Update: Secret Firmy Magazine is the monthly business magazine of Kommersant, the Russian equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. (Thanks to Bruce Bennett for the info)

Damn Tourists!
Twinned with the Touristy Map Of The World is this amazing set of visualisations from Eric Fisher detailing concentrations of tourists in cities around the world, using geotagged photos. Blue are photos taken by locals. Red by tourists. Gorgeous concept and look. [via Burrito Justice]

If Crime Was Elevation
The peaks of San Francisco. Great concept converting crime figures into topology from coder Doug Mccune. Thanks to @calflyn.

How Much CO2??
Here’s a little interactive thing we did for GE’s EcoImagination initiative. A little window landscaping the relationship between driving and CO2 in America. Coded by the excellent Daniel Goldsworthy.

quickies

• Depth Charge – Not loving all the design elements but I scrolled right down to the end
• Visual Medical Records – Nice early idea
• Meet iPad’s competition – Another great viz from SectionDesign
• Marca World Cup Schedule – About a quillion people have sent me this.
  (Thanks Nuno Monteiro, Tom Broughton, Richard Stewart, Feisal, Onur Yirmibesolglu etc)

As ever, if you’ve spotted any goodies, send them over. Thanks! David.w

Cylinder by Andy Huntington and Drew Allan is an elegant series of data sculpture based on sound analysis. A mapping of the frequency and time domains produces cylindrical forms representing the spatial characteristics of the sound input. Physical versions of the digital 3D models are then 3D printed using stereolithography.

The idea of mapping sound to space is not unfamiliar. The Cylinder project shows similar strategies to those used in the exhibition Frozen, which showed sound represented as a continous space rather than as a one-dimensional signal. However, Cylinder is from 2003, predating Frozen and making it somewhat of an early example of the data sculpture genre.

There is a tangential similarity between Huntington’s pristine objects and Booshan & Widrig’s Binaural object. But in fact the spiky geometries of both works are a result of the numeric data underlying the form. Any data set will yield inherent patterns, and in the case of digital sound two “defaults” present themselves: The waveform (a 1D graph) and the spectral map found through FFT analysis, which represents a 2D map of spectral energies in the time domain. Any translation of these numeric representations into visual form must grapple with the fact that while they may be faithful representations of the data, they rarely give a good idea of how the sound is experienced by a human listener.

The Cylinder series show a range of different waveforms, some showing an apparent orderly structure with others suggesting a noisier sound input. Titles like “Seahorse”, “Design” and “Breath” imply the source sounds used to produce the forms. Their success as aesthetic objects derive from their complexity as well as from the clean quality given by the 3D printing process.

A disclaimer is in order: The following post is not original content, rather it is a collection of links provided by various people on a private mailing list. The initial request (from Memo Akten) was for “really hot data visualization”, and the following suggestions were made by some fairly knowledgeable people.

They are presented here as an unedited list of links, they are listed in the order they appeared on the list. Some are fairly new projects while others are well-known canonical works. Two new favorites are shown above, namely Social Collider and Synchronous Objects.

Some pseudo-random Info Viz links

• Tom Carden: “As always VisualComplexity and Infosthetics are good places to start.” Tom’s Delicious bookmarks on the subject is a treasure trove in its own right.
• A good survey article by Mitchell Whitelaw: Art Against Information: Case Studies in Data Practice
• Data Flow is an excellent book from Die Gestalten presenting an unconventional eye to visualization practices.
• Karsten Schmidt recommends:
  • The ever-present Ben Fry: benfry.com/projects (Ben’s blog is an excellent read, by the way)
  • Martin Wattenberg et al.: History Flow
  • Marius Watz: Knight Capital Group
  • Tom Carden’s work, see Stamen and www.tom-carden.co.uk.
  • Karsten Schmidt & Sascha Pohflepp: Socialcollider (a Twitter visualization made as an experiment for Google Chrome)
  • Karsten Schmidt: Base-26
• William Forsythe and ACCAD (lead generative designer Matthew Lewis): Synchronous Objects
• Emily Gobeille & Theodore Watson: Zanyparade (programmed elements combined with hand-drawn forms)
• Syl Eckermann & Gerald Nestler: Plastic Trade-Off
• Edward Tufte: Ask E.T. forum

Jumping on bandwagons is best done sooner rather than later, so we are hereby happy to announce that Generator.x now has its very own Twitter feed.

Microblogs like Twitter allow for a very immediate communication that requires less of a commitment than a regular blog. A 500 word blog post might take a few hours to write, whereas a 140 character long Twitter update only takes a few minutes. The interaction between Twitter users is also more explicit than is typical for blogs, creating a distributed conversation that at best can be thought of as a hive mind.

Here is the feed from twitter.com/generatorx so far:

• Visualization: 2008 Presidential Candidate Donations: McCain vs. Obama http://is.gd/3iPS
• Erik Natzke goes to NextFest: http://is.gd/3mCb
• Martin Wattenberg talks to WIRED about big text data: http://is.gd/3mzI
• Knowledge Cartography – cartography as tool for communication and the production of meaning: http://is.gd/3lma Video: http://is.gd/3lmj
• Media Facades 2008 in Berlin looks interesting: http://is.gd/3kQQ
• Blinkenlights: Oldie but Goodie. http://is.gd/3irX Now with a library for Processing for creating Blinkenlights movies.
• Maxalot presents the projection series “Processing Light” tonight at Todaysart, The Hague: http://is.gd/3a9t.
• @anfischer has posted nice documentation of recent work on Flickr: http://is.gd/3a2a
• Podcast from Die Gestalten about Data Flow, their new book about visualization: http://is.gd/37Lm
• Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective http://is.gd/35jU, MASS MoCA
• Vizualizar’08: Database City – Call for papers http://is.gd/33bV. The seminar will be at Medialab Prado, curated by Jose Luis De Vicente.
• The Piksel festival in Bergen has posted calls for their “abstract code real code” theme: http://is.gd/2Ytd
• Mitchell Whitelaw has an interesting new series: Limits to Growth http://is.gd/2WIR. See also his Flickr: http://is.gd/2WIU
• @toxi retweet : new blog post: Generative design in 4096 bytes or less (Will Wright & the 4k demoscene) http://is.gd/2UFj
• WMMNA has a nice summary of C.STEM 2008: Breeding Objects http://is.gd/2VJV.
• CORE.FORMULA has a nice blog post about Austrian sculptor Erwin Hauger: http://is.gd/2TIF. See also Flickr:http://is.gd/2TIO
• C.STEM 2008 – BREEDING OBJECTS currently underway in Turin, feat. fabbing and generative art. http://is.gd/2OTX
• Esther Stocker makes wonderful installations of grid structures in 2D and 3D: http://is.gd/2OTM
• New issue of Vague Terrain about curating net-based art, guest edited by CONT3XT.NET. http://is.gd/2DdM
• Blog post from @arikan: From Network Diagram to Structured Text http://tinyurl.com/5kb8g5
• C.STEM 2008 in Turin has a nice lineup of fabbing works : http://is.gd/2mEl (In Italian)
• Jeff Clark is doing some nice visualization work with a focus on social media: http://www.neoformix.com/
• Just created a Generator.x Twitter feed to compensate for long breaks between blog posts…

5 Days Off MEDIA: Frozen
Wed 2 through Sat 26 July 2008
Melkweg Mediaroom & Paradiso, Amsterdam

• Andreas Nicolas Fischer & Benjamin Maus (DE)
• Leander Herzog (CH)
• Marius Watz
• Daniel Widrig & Shajay Booshan (UK)
• Sound: Freiband / Frans de Waard (NL)
• Sound: Alexander Rishaug (NO)

Frozen (part of the 5 Days Off MEDIA festival) is an exhibition of experiments in the representation of sound in media beyond the auditory. It examines the sound signal as a virtual space, presenting possible mappings that visualize or interpret the structures contained within the soundwaves.

Frozen was proposed and commissioned by Jan Hiddink and the 5 Days Off MEDIA festival in Amsterdam, and consists exclusively of original work. It was conceived with Generator.x 2.0 as a conceptual reference (all four artists in the show were also involved in Generator.x 2.0), but with a clearly defined focus: The representation of sound as spatial structures, realized as physical objects through the use of digital fabrication technologies.

For more information, see the documentation in the Frozen Flickr set, Leander Herzog’s FFT set or the blog posts by Benjamin Maus and Andreas Nicolas Fischer.

Over the past years, there has been an enormous development in the field of live-presented audio-visual performance art. Owing to digital techniques, image and sound are connected in a way that was previously unthinkable. Frozen is headed in the opposite direction. Frozen pulls the plug and presents audio art, prints, and sculptures as independent, but interconnected works of art.

In the Mediaroom at the Melkweg multi-channel sound pieces can be experienced over an advanced speaker setup, accompanied by sound in a "frozen" form: Images and sculptural objects made using sound as input. These artworks use audio analysis and custom software processes to extract meaningful data from the sound signal, creating a mapping between audio and other media. Frozen will feature digital prints as well as four "sound sculptures" created using digital fabrication technology such as rapid prototyping, CNC and laser cutting, which allow for the direct translation of a digital model into physical form.

Frozen arose in collaboration with the Norwegian artist and curator Marius Watz, whose Generator.x project investigates the implications of generative systems and computational models of creation. The recent exhibition Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the Screen brought together artists and architects to explore the potential of this new mode of creation.

‘Audio sculptures’ will be on display by Andreas Nicolas Fischer (DE) & Benjamin Maus (DE), Leander Herzog (CH), Marius Watz (NO) and Daniel Widrig & Shajay Booshan (UK). These sculptures are based on audioworks by Freiband (Nl, Frans de Waard), and Alexander Rishaug (No).

Frozen is presented in the Melkweg Mediaroom and at Paradiso.

5 Days Off MEDIA is part of the 5 Days Off festival for electronic music from Wed 2 through July 6. 5 Days Off MEDIA presents three themes: Crosswire, Frozen and Roots. Locations: Melkweg, Paradiso, Dutch Institute for Media Art and Heineken Music Hall.

Paul Prudence is known as the author of the excellent Dataisnature, but also increasingly for his impressive output of generative artworks. Having migrated from Flash to the more powerful VVVV, he’s now focusing on audio-responsive generative systems that evoke organic 3D spaces. A good example of his work is Talysis, shown above in live performance during the "Tomorrow Now" event at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, Italy last year.

Talysis mimics analog video feedback systems, recursively transforming a geometric form through a series of render passes until a crystalline form emerges. The patterns produced seem unstable, constantly about to morph into new configurations. The strict symmetry evokes a sense of folding and unfolding movement, as though one was watches fragments of a 4-dimensional form projecting into Cartesian space.

Be sure to read Paul’s own post about feedback: Chaotic fingerprints and space-time labyrinths. There is also a clip #1 and #2.

The stark videos of Brandon Morse present the viewer with excercises in tension, set tableaux in which structures morph and twist under physical constraints. Stripped-down architectural forms that ought to exhibit the rigidity of highrise buildings instead engage in a tug-of-war, the result of a string simulation distributing kinetic force through a network of nodes.

Morse seems to delight in setting up scenarios where seemingly ordered constructs rapidly degenerate under the influence of virtual force, which can only be observed through the dramatic effects it exerts. The end result is a state of irrecoverable chaos, brought about by causal simulated chain of action and reaction.

Unlike software-based generative artworks that exhibit endless timelines, Morse’s videos (created in the high-end animation package Houdini) display a clear dramaturgy. But rather than being a side effect of their status as “canned” video, the presence of an explicit beginning and end is here part and parcel of the work’s logic, reinforcing the movement towards the inevitable.

Favorite setups include explosions and collapses, dryly observed through an impartial camera that merely records the inevitable. Work titles like Cumulus_1 and Big Bang refer to physical simulations. Others, like Preparing for the inevitable (a particle system tornado bearing down on a wireframe house), are more explicitly apocalyptic. But while the implication of doom is clear, the image is deliberately kept abstract and artificial. Lacking a focus for projected empathy, the viewer is left with the sense of observing a scientific experiment, a computer-generated Armageddon minus the carnage.

Brandon Morse is represented by Conner Contemporary. For more examples of his work, visit his site Coplanar.org.

The video shown above was posted on Morse’s Flickr stream as a test of the new Video on Flickr feature. Hopefully more videos will start appearing on the Generator.x Flickr pool as a result, although the Generator.x channel on Vimeo is still our official choice for posting animated work.

Update: It’s now clear that the news about the Serero project for the Eiffel Tower is a hoax, as seen on Archinect and NY Times. Thanks to Sarrach for the tip.

Good news for anyone planning to visit that Parisian icon, the Eiffel Tower: A competition for an extension of the tower’s public areas aims to reduce wait times and increase its visitor capacity. And best of all, the winning entry was produced through a generative design process.

Serero Architects have proposed an extension of the top plateau of the tower, using a carbon Kevlar structure capable of carrying the weight of visitors venturing out onto the observation deck to take in the beauty of the French capital. Without any physical modification to the existing structure, it will double the available floor surface.

The generative script was inspired by the cross bracing beams that give the Eiffel Tower its architectural signature, generating 3 interconnected woven forms. The result is a nice combination of the current architectural trend of sub-divided surfaces and the Art Nouveau flourishes of the original tower. Considering that many Parisians hated the tower when it was first built, it will be interesting to see how they react to this revision of their shared heritage.

See Serero Architects for more of their projects involving generative design. Via Madeincalifornia, a great blog about computational architecture.

Saturday was the last day of the Generator.x 2.0 exhibition at [DAM]Berlin. The occasion was marked with an informal curator talk, followed by Q+A. The 1-month show has had a great reception, proving popular both with the Transmediale crowd and the general art viewing public. While it’s always nice to reach with a community of one’s peers, reaching “regular people” is extra satisfying.

A slightly less enjoyable task was the disassembly of the exhibition in preparation for shipping. It is always bittersweet moment to see an exhibition disassembled and stuck in the back of an old Toyota Corrolla. See the following image to get an impression of this anti-climactic view.

Thankfully, any sadness was alleviated by knowing that 24 hours after being packed into this car, the works arrived safely in Turin, Italy to be part of the SHARE Festival. Bruce Sterling is the guest curator of this year’s festival, the theme of which is “Manufacturing”. After Bruce attended to the opening of Generator.x 2.0 we started discussing the possibility of taking the show to SHARE, a plan that will come to fruition tomorrow when the exhibition re-opens in Turin.

A few of the pieces from Berlin won’t be on display in Turin, for instance Aperiodic_Vertebrae by Theverymany aka Marc Fornes and Skylar Tibbits. This ambitious installation turned out to be too complex for the show at [DAM]Berlin, and so we sadly had to display a creative deconstruction of the intricate polygon structure instead of the cantilever bridge-like form it was meant to be. But now there is the exciting news that Skylar and Marc are producing a reworked and more stable version for NODE08 in Frankfurt. We look forward to seeing documentation of it fully built.

A few pieces have been also been added, the results of a fabbing workshop at HyperWerk that followed on the heels of the Berlin workshop and featured some of the same people. Martin Fuchs has provided some intriguing polygon forms in paper and cardboard that he didn’t have time to finish in Berlin, and Leander Herzog has produced a selection of plastic branching structures that point towards an organic exploration of plastic as material.

As the project now finally winds down, we wish to express our gratitude to everybody who contributed to making Generator.x 2.0 such a great even, in particular the following:

• Club Transmediale, in particular the curators Jan Rohlf and Oliver Baurhenn who gave the project the green light and supported it wonderfully through its various phases.
• Anke Eckardt, for being an excellent producer both for the workshop and for the concert evening.
• [DAM]Berlin and Wolf Lieser, for providing the gallery space and much-needed help in turning a big mess into a presentable exhibition in the space of a single afternoon.
• The Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and its crew, for providing everything from technical support to much-needed coffee.
• Lasern and Martin Bauer, for making it possible to have a laser cutter on site, and for helping out with laser know-how.
• HyperWerk Institute for Postindustrial Design, for fabbing support and for contributing a quota of skilled students.
• The Office For Contemporary Art Norway for supporting the project financially.
• Bruce Sterling and Luca Barbeni of the SHARE Festival, for taking the show to Italy and showing it to a new audience.

Finally, we wish to thank all the participants for their enthusiasm and generous sharing of skills during the workshop. It was a pleasure to work with you. We can only hope that Generator.x 2.0 will result in new networks being formed, with interesting projects as a result.

We have posted about the Vienna scene and the Austrian Abstracts here on previous occasions, but the video work that was central to that movement has generally not been available for viewing online. Therefore, it’s with great pleasure we see that Tina Frank has posted some early videos to Vimeo. Let’s hope other artists follow her initiative, it would be nice to have an online archive of these early experiments somewhere.

Shown above is the video AKA by Skot, produced for Gasbook 4. Skot was the name used by Tina Frank and Mathias Gmachl for a number of collaborations from 1996 to 2000. Gmachl is also one of the founders of farmersmanual, a collective that was central to the Vienna scene. “Aka” means “red” in Japanese, and the video was made with Image/ine software from Steim, one of the very first softwares to support realtime processing of video on a regular computer.

Frank created the video "iii" below by taking digital audio files of the music by Peter Rehberg (Pita) and opening them as raw pixel data in Photoshop. An oval image mask was superimposed, giving a more specific form to the resulting video. The result is classic glitch, taking a signal of a given form and deliberately misinterpreting it as something else.

More videos on Tina Frank's Vimeo stream.