Depicting Patterns

HOUSE OF CARDS

Lasers and sensors are used to scan the band Radiohead into a three-dimensional particle-driven data experience. The code and data are launched on Google Code as an open source “music video without video” project.

FLIGHT PATTERNS

The paths of air traffic over North America visualized in color and form from data provided by the US Federal Aviation Administration.

A collaboration with Wired Magazine and FlightView Software, these flight path renderings show the altitudes, makes, and models of more than 205,000 different aircraft being monitored by the FAA on August 12, 2008.

More information and animations can be found at aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/index.html

NEW YORK TALK EXCHANGE

Visualizations for the New York Talk Exchange, a project by the Senseable City Lab at MIT for the MoMA. New York Talk Exchange illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of AT&T long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world. Historical visualizations include a distorting world map and borough view illustrating which cities talk with which parts of NYC.

Created with Kristian Kloeckl, Andrea Vaccari, and Franscesco Calabrese.

TEN THOUSAND CENTS

Ten Thousand Cents is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as an interactive/video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously.

The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.

A collaboration with Takashi Kawashima.