Is post social media friendship an emotional investment of diminishing returns? It really depends who you ask. Midwest-based designer Colin Pinegar’s recent BFA project Best Friends definitely calls the authenticity of ubiquitous connectivity into question, or at least adds some nuance to qualifying these relationships. Pinegar created a ‘scorecard’ for his Facebook friends that awarded each online connection 1-25 points based off a range of criteria (do I know this person’s phone number? can I recognize this person by their name alone? etc.)

Continue reading.... Best Friends – Casting in wax 451 connections on Facebook [Objects]

The AntiMap by Trent Brooks is an Open Source creative toolset for recording and visualising your own data. The project currently consists of a phone utility application (AntiMap Log – iOS/Android) for data capture, and a couple of web/desktop applications (AntiMap Simple (Javascript) and AntiMap Video (oF)) for post analysis and data visualisation.

The mobile application uses the GPS and Compass sensors on your phone to extract and store the following data: latitude, longitude, compass direction, speed (kph), distance (kms), time (milliseconds), and finally an input field for optional points of interest. Recorded data is saved to a CSV file at 30 FPS with filenames matching the date & time they were created. Eg: ‘150811_1230_08.csv’, was created on the 15th August 2011, at 12:30pm and 8 seconds. For Android users, files can be retrieved from the ‘AntiMap’ folder on the SD card. For iPhone users, files can be retrieved from your device in iTunes/Apps/AntiMap Log Documents (just under the ‘File Sharing’ heading). The mobile applications are free and Open Source, with Processing (Android) and Openframeworks (iPhone). Source code is provided in hope that users can learn from and find interesting ways to visualise their data.

Continue reading.... AntiMap [oF, Android, iPhone, Javascript, Processing]

Solyaris by Beat Raess is an “exploration into organic information design to visualise movies, actors, directors and their relationship”. The application for iPad made in Cinder allows you to search the entire Open Movie Database (TMDb) collection for movies, actors or directors. Expand nodes to gather information about their connections. Learn about the cast and filmography.

Continue reading.... Solyaris [iPad, Cinder]

Fascinated by ideas of mental maps and obtaining an insight into the person’s perception of the world by simply asking them to draw a map from memory, in his ongoing Design Interactions master, Benedikt Groß created a Processing application that allows users to mould OpenStreetMap maps based on their recollection and experience. First the points are placed on the map, the mesh is constructed and map modified according to the new point position.

I wrote two litte tools (in Processing), MapMap_App and TransformOSM_Droplet. With the first one I was able to create and save a transformation matrix, the procedere is highly subjective and envolves quite a lot of legwork. Btw. a huge thanks to Hartmut Bohnacker for helping me out with the math part, I was not savvy enough to figure it out in such a clever and smart way. The second tool processed then the delta (=transformation matrix) and the OpenStreetMap Data of Vauxhall to a last OpenStreetMap file. In the end I just had to render the file to it’s final visual representation. I decided to style the maps in the google maps style to give them a more “official” look; sidenote: it seems we are already all cognitive branded by google to their particular style. The rendering was done with Maperitive (free desktop app to styple OpenStreetMap files in a quite convenient way).

Continue reading.... MapMap Vauxhall [Processing]

Visual Complexity is a site maintained by Manuel Lima which collects projects that deal with complexity in information. Not always about communicating clarity the site’s predominant focus was acknowledging beauty that exists in complex representation of information and data. Within a year of it’s launch, Visual Complexity began to attract large readership, following closely every post were thousands of readers, often reblogged and quoted. Manuel became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, nominated by Creativity magazine as “one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009″ and prior to becoming Senior UX Design Lead at Microsoft Bing he has worked as a Senior User Experience Designer at Nokia and Senior Interaction Designer at the leading digital agency R/GA. He has also spoken about information visualization at numerous events such as TED, Lift, OFFF, Reboot, VizThink, IxDA Interaction, Royal College of Art and others.

The book Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information is Manuel’s voyage of trying reveal patterns that exists amongst designers, researches and scientist that employ innovative mixes of colour, symbols, graphics, algorithms and interactivity in a attempt to clarify and often beautifully, what would otherwise be a clutter of data. 

Continue reading.... Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information [Books]

T(ether) is a novel spatially aware display that supports intuitive interaction with volumetric data.

Created by  Matthew Blackshaw (@mblackshaw), Dávid Lakatos (@dogichow), Hiroshi Ishii and Ken Perlin, the display acts as a window offering users a perspective view of three- dimensional data through tracking of head position and orientation. Virtual objects can be created and manipulated through gestures made using the hand. Likewise, multiple people can edit the same virtual environment.

T(ether) creates a 1:1 mapping between real and virtual coordinate space allowing immersive exploration of the joint domain. Our system creates a shared workspace in which co-located or remote users can collaborate in both the real and virtual worlds. The system allows input through capacitive touch on the display and a motion-tracked glove. When placed behind the display, the user’s hand extends into the virtual world, enabling the user to interact with objects directly.

Continue reading.... T(ether) [Cinder]

The spectacle and surplus masculinity of Hollywood is hardly run-of-the-mill source material for generative art, but Canadian software artist Jeremy Rotsztain has been diligently exploring transforming cinematic convention into rich, abstract compositions for three years now. Rotsztain’s Action Painting project (first featured on CAN in fall 2009) employs scenes and sound design—’data’ from action movies—as raw material to generate abstract expressionist style animations. “Revving Motors, Spinning Wheels” (below) is one of four videos released by Rotsztain this summer that illustrate just how far this project has come – the piece reads as a love letter to both Jackson Pollock and Jason Bourne. On close viewing the source material (culled from Ronin, The French Connection, etc.)  is clearly organized thematically and the video functions as a serial examination of the stock components of definitive chase scenes. Screeching brakes, blaring sirens, lead-footed acceleration and the inevitable Ballardian-endgame all filter through the mix in clusters of topical clips.

Continue reading.... Action Painting Redux [openFrameworks]

[Eric Fischer / Locals and Tourists #45 (GTWA #133): Los Angeles and Pasadena / 2010]

A month ago in Minneapolis, nestled amidst the brilliant programming of the inaugural Eyeo Festival, Mark Hansen organized a panel on data visualization and social justice that brought veteran designers Laura Kurgan, Michael Migurski and Lisa Strausfeld together to discuss visual communication, representation and agency. The conversation that ensued was extremely provocative and challenged many of the basic assumptions underlying data visualization’s capacity as a polemical or exploratory medium. This critical engagement was perhaps best summarized by Kurgan when she reminded her fellow panelists and the audience that it is dangerous to confuse data with knowledge. Later, Migurski described his optimism in thinking about “people as pixels” within these representational systems whereby designers have the opportunity to highlight spatial inconsistencies and (ideally) engender engagement and civic action. Migurski summarized this question of responsibility in a blog post in advance of the session as “do we reveal new things about society by viewing data, or do we bend society into new forms by choosing data that can be viewed?” This introspection was timely, not only within the milieu of a creative coding summit, but as a reminder of the far-reaching implications of the visual representation of urban space.(1)

Continue reading.... Mediated Cityscapes 03: DIY Cartography [Theory]

The decoded conference stands for the combination of design and code. It combines creative and technological aspects of our everyday life and brings them all together on a one day kick ass event in the heart of Munich. International speakers from the field of generative design, computational art, information visualization and hardware tinkering are teaming up to share some insights of their work and tell their very own stories.

decoded session line-up 2011 include eBoy, Fluid Forms, Prof. Herbert W. Franke, LIA, Kate Hartman, Jer Thorp aka blprnt +more.

Location: Freiheizhalle, Rainer-Werner-Fassbinder Platz 1, 80636 München, www.freiheiz.com
Date: Sat. 15th October 2011
Price: €89.99 (student discounts available)

http://www.decoded-conference.com

We have one ticket to give away! All you have to do is tweet this post as a reply to @creativeapps using #decoded_can hashtag – or leave a comment on Facebook to this post and we’ll pick the best tweet next week Monday (witty always works).

Photos from 2010 below.

Cinemetrics is the thesis project of Frederic Brodbeck‘s at the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK), Den Haag. It aims to create a visual “fingerprint” for film using the editing structure, color, speech and motion. Different characteristics are analysed using python and openCV, and data visualised using a custom Processing application. This allows films to be interpreted or compared side by side.

Being someone who really enjoys movies and cinema, I always notice little things about the style of a movie, so film and its characteristics were an interesting starting point for this project. Furthermore my thesis is about generative / computational design and what role writing code plays regarding new approaches in (graphic) design. It was clear that for my graduation project I would use the methods I described in the thesis and that it would involve a certain amount of programming in order to visualize data. However, today there are already a lot of information graphics using meta-data related to film and cinema (budget, box office data, awards won, relationship between characters etc.). That’s why I wanted to use the movie itself as a source of data, to see what sort of information can be extracted from it, to find ways of visualizing it and to create the necessary tools to do this.

Tools for disassembling video files into their components (video, audio, subtitles, etc.) and processing them (shot detection, average shot length, motion measuring, color palettes), as well as an interactive application to generate and compare different movie fingerprints are all available as code here.

To accompany the analysis, poster series show the most important steps of the process. They explains where the data comes from and what techniques have been used.

Project Page

Frederic Brodbeck is graphic designer and creative coder. Recently graduated from the Graphic Design department at the KABK