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Volume 2, Issue 1
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Our second year starts off with four fantastic projects. The first two projects in this issue focus on concepts of creating a perception of our surroundings through visual and auditory inputs. Each presents a novel manner to visualize a landscape and sound-based mapping — one with the scale of New York City and another to a community festival. While diverse in methods and scales, these projects offer a unique view into spatial mapping.
Our third project is a fun and interactive way of visualizing political dialogue (utilizing speeches from the 110th United States Congress) with a set of animations similar to the popular JibJab cartoons. Our fourth project is a somber yet beautiful art and visualization installation discussing the effects of war. Together, these two pieces discuss the simultaneous power and fragility of individuals and words within larger dialogues.
— Brian Willison, Publisher, Parsons Journal for Information Mapping |
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Pastiche — A Collective Composition of New York City
Ivan Safrin & Christian Marc Schmidt, MFA
The city is a composite of impressions. Beyond the built environment, it is a constantly changing pastiche of associations and experiences - not just of the people who inhabit it, but of the larger community. New York City...
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The city is a composite of impressions. Beyond the built environment, it is a constantly changing pastiche of associations and experiences - not just of the people who inhabit it, but of the larger community. New York City, in particular, has two realities: the reality of the physical environment, and the reality of the idea - of what the city and its diverse neighborhoods signify. Inseparably intertwined, these two realities constantly continue to inform each other. Pastiche is a dynamic data visualization that maps keywords from blog articles to the New York neighborhoods they are written in reference to, geographically positioned in a navigable, spatial view. Keywords are assigned based on relevance, and surround their corresponding neighborhoods. The result is a dynamically changing description of the city, formed around individual experiences and perspectives. Conceptually, Pastiche is a parallel experience of the city, a map that not only documents, but also suggests action. It is a public counterpart to the private physical architecture of the city. Its source an aggregate of individual blogs, Pastiche is a system that anyone has the ability to contribute to. It defines a new kind of public space, while both proposing an experience and inviting comparison - in the process of relating one's own perspective to a larger collective subjectivity, one situates oneself in relation to an impromptu community, formed around the idea of New York. Close this window
Ivan Safrin is a Russian-born software developer and independent video game designer living in New York City. Combining his in-depth technical knowledge with a passion for game and information design, he strives to create novel and playful applications. He currently works as a senor developer at R/GA New York where he develops interactive experiences for Nike. Christian Marc Schmidt is a hybrid interaction/graphic designer with a focus on the design of quantitative information. Having worked at the design consultancies IDEO and Pentagram, and currently an interaction designer at Microsoft, his experience spans the fields of information design, interaction design, and media installation. He honed his interest in working with information in the Communication Design program at Parsons School of Design in New York, and while pursuing his master's degree in graphic design at Yale University. Close this window
Project Title: Pastiche — A Collective Composition of New York City Keywords: Data Visualization, Information Art, Typography, Interaction, Mapping, Collective Consciousness, Gestalt, Interpretive Close this window
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Ordnance Survey: Exploring Activity through Large Scale Topologies and Auditory Mappings
Dr. Tom Davis, PhD & Nicholas Ward, MSc
This paper describes recent work on a large-scale, distributed audio installation entitled, Ordnance Survey. It explores problems associated with presenting an overview of large complex data sets in real-time, through the creation of a spatially separate audio-visual environment in a manner that aims to provide an immersive experience of disparate events in a single locality. Ordnance Survey consists of an immersive audiovisual environment fed by a network of geographically dispersed sensors that together provides an overview of activity and incident at multi-site, spatially disparate locations. These sensors may be considered as parasitic agents that feed on the activity in their local area creating audio in relation to the proximity and behavior of festivalgoers themselves, the weather, and the festival performers. This audio is transmitted back to a central listening room where it is used in the construction of a multi-speaker soundscape. The soundscape therefore directly relates to the complex interactions that construct the weekend's event; tracking disparate occurrences such as people's movement around the site, audio from concerts and the regularity of toilet visits. In the dimly lit space of the listening room the audience are presented with simultaneous audio-visual experiences that directly relate and convey a detailed yet comprehensible representation of the whole festival. Tracking the flow of the observers and the observed, the installation provides an overview of disparate events all in one place. Close this window
Davis is a digital artist working mainly in the medium of sound installation. He recently graduated from the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast with a PhD in Sonic Arts. His practice and theory based research centres on issues of Embodiment, Ecology and Complexity in Sound Installation. Davis has exhibited work across Europe and has performed at festivals and conferences in Europe and the United States. Ward is a Belfast based interdisciplinary artist. His work is predominantly sonic in nature, exploring notions of mechanism and physicality through installation and performance. Ward is currently studying for a PhD at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queens University, Belfast. Close this window
Project Title: Ordnance Survey: Exploring Activity through Large Scale Topologies and Auditory Mappings Keywords: Audio Topology, User Experience, Awareness Display, Activity Sonification, Sensual experience Close this window
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Congress Speaks
Dino Citraro, BA & Kim Rees, BA
Congress Speaks is an entertaining online exploration of the more than 14.5 million words spoken by the United States 110th Congress. Individual legislators can be compared according to what they spoke and how often, their congressional tenure...
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Download Congress Speaks PDF (5pgs, 1.2Mb) Access Congress Speaks
Congress Speaks is an entertaining online exploration of the more than 14.5 million words spoken by the United States 110th Congress. Individual legislators can be compared according to what they spoke and how often, their congressional tenure, and their voting record. States can also be compared by viewing their party representation, party vocalization breakdown, and a state-by-state word count. While exploring which topics are most unique to the individual legislators, interesting and unexpected words start to appear, like "wolves," "slavery," and "wilderness." These associations also happen while exploring the words used for individual states. In addition to being educational, the site is entertaining, too. Visitors can pit legislators against each other to see who is more verbose. Each legislator's mouth is animated and portrayed on a caricature of their political party's mascot, a donkey for Democrats, an elephant for Republicans, and in the case of Independents, an ostrich. There are even crowd reactions, unexpected animations, confetti and balloons. Close this window
Both authors are partners in Periscopic, an award-winning interactive design and development firm specializing in user-centric design with a strong focus on information visualization. The company's work has appeared in several publications, including the 2009 Communication Arts Interactive Annual and in the information Design Sourcebook. Dino Citraro is a 15-year veteran of the multimedia industry. His work has spanned interactive motion pictures, multi-player online games, immersive data visualizations, and interactive hardware installations. Kim Rees has over fifteen years of experience in the interactive industry and is a prominent individual in the information visualization community. She has spoken at numerous events including the CERF Biennial Conference, Tableau Conference, WebVisions, and Portland Data Visualization among others. Close this window
Project Title: Congress Speaks Keywords: Information visualization, data visualization, U.S. Congress, Gov 2.0 speeches, voting records, politics, tag cloud, word cloud, bifurcated mosaic plot, strip treemap, tornado chart Close this window
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Requiem
Sayoko Yoshida, MFA
The idea that a single death, followed or in conjunction with many deaths by the same cause, begins to diminish that tragedy, is in itself a tragedy. The increasing number of fatalities, the length of the conflict, and the controversial nature of the war...
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Download Requiem PDF (8pgs, 1.9Mb)
The idea that a single death, followed or in conjunction with many deaths by the same cause, begins to diminish that tragedy, is in itself a tragedy. The increasing number of fatalities, the length of the conflict, and the controversial nature of the war have begun to diminish the importance of each single loss amongst people in the population at large. The statistics become so abstracted that sometimes it becomes difficult to grasp the content or the meaning of the scale of human loss. Requiem is an installation art piece that commemorates the souls of the war-departed. By transforming the abstract data into something more tangible and perceivable to emphasize the impact of each single fatality. It serves as a bridge of awareness to connect public consciousness to the ongoing conflict in Iraq. By emphasizing the individuals while recognizing the gravity and pain of collective loss, participants are awakened to the impact of each single fatality through physical presence of abstract information. The title derives from one of the definitions of requiem: an act or token of remembrance. Close this window
Sayoko Yoshida is a New York based multidisciplinary designer with a solid graphic design background. She earned her MFA from Parsons The New School for Design in 2009 while working as a Senior Information Designer at Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (PIIM). Sayoko is constantly seeking possibilities to explore new interactive technologies and visualization techniques. Close this window
Project Title: Requiem Keywords: Installation art, requiem, memorial, data visualization, statistics, innumeracy, physicality, metaphor Years of Project: 2008-2009 Close this window
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We always welcome feedback from our subscribers and contributors to help make the journal the best publication for the field of information, data, and knowledge visualization. Please do not hesitate to contact us with your thoughts.
— Brian Willison, Publisher, Parsons Journal for Information Mapping; Director, Parsons Institute for Information Mapping |
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