Data Sculptures
April 27th, 2009pulse
pulse visualizes live the recent emotional expressions, written on private weblog communities like blogger.com. Weblog entries are compared to a list of emotions, which refers to Robert Plutchik’s “Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion” (1980). Plutchik describes eight basic human emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, anticipation. He developed a diagram in which those eight emotions, together with their weakened and amplified alternatives, form a three dimensional cone, consisting of 24 areas. This cone is the basic shape of pulse, which can enlarge in the 24 directions of the different emotions. Each time an emotion or a synonym of it is found in a recent blog entry, the shape-shifting object transforms itself in a way that the new volume represents a piece of the Internet’s current emotional condition.
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nowhere/Datenfräsmaschine
A data visualization machine that erodes rivers, canyons & valleys driven by online search queries. Search requests get inscribed in a block of PU-foam by a 3D milling-machine. The search queries are interpreted as eroding forces on the surface of the landscape and used as energy impulses that move the milling-head steps forward. Activity removes material, inactivity keeps it. In times with less activity (e.g. night hours) the machine works slow and at peak times (e.g. midday) the machine works very fast & hectically. The space/time sculpture embodies an not existing place, made visible by the users of the search-engine.
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In The Future 100×100
In The Future 100×100 is a data sculpture which visualizes 100 years of forward thought. Using web-crawls of Google News, Google Blog and Google Scholar, the phrase “in the future” was associated with key words and phrases which reveal previous though about the future of our world. The top 100 terms for each year were categorized using the Dewey Decimal system, and mapped onto a grid. Holes were drilled into sheets of plexiglass whose sizes correspond to their frequency. For example, “war” is the biggest hole in 1945.
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bus structure 2am-2pm
A 3D data sculpture of the Sunday Minneapolis / St. Paul public transit system, where the horizontal axes represent directional movement and the vertical represents time. It is constructed of 47 horizontal layers, each forming a map of the bus routes that run during a given interval of time. Within each layer, every transit route that operates at that time is represented by wood balls placed at its scheduled stops, connected by the horizontal copper rods.
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Tidal Datums
Tidal Datums is a wooden table whose form is inspired by the formal language of data graphics. The table is intended to be a representation of analytic information through the medium of furniture. Data graphs were gathered from NOAA’s historic tide database, more specifically the measurements of tides at San Francisco Bay over a 4 week period, and then translated into tangible material. The forms modeled from the data not only reveal a dynamic pattern, but also facilitate a “new way” of experiencing information by enabling a physical interaction of tidal patterns with the body.
