This *digital sculpture* should visualize the conflict of the european identity; the ambiguous relationship of Europe with its residents. To the outside, Europe cares to look united and whole, but inside Europe no-one feels himself to be “european”.
It’s a collection of 27 points that attract and repel each other (red/white connections), with these relationships gradually changing every second. A skin partially covers the internal hussle, representing europe’s facade to the rest of the world. Built in processing.
While seeking a way to document abandoned spaces, I strayed somewhat and ended up exploring the shady area between a virtual and the real world.
I wrote a program in processing that recovered perspective data from a photograph (or video image) by placing the photo in a 3D model. Following this it reverts the perspective, printing out the walls in the image as “actual” wallpaper. The walls seem to have been recreated, but all detail in the furthest tiles is missing.
The original image: a photo of the wall of the 81st st. subway station in New York, captured using a wide angle lens.
Viewed from the ‘original’ standpoint, everything looks normal. The recreated wall and the original photograph look identical.
From the other end it looks rather abstract, as these tiles are made by stretching up a couple of pixels. Almost all detail has been lost, though you can still see the whale…
Last night I finished work on a interactive visualization of the datasets I collected from COW, containing all data on conflicts that had occurred globally in the past two centuries. The final piece has become an experiment on what amount of information can be put into one graph while remaining informative. The visualization works on two levels, an overview that allows the spotting of trends, and an in-depth look into a particular time frame.
One navigates through the set along a time line that can be controlled by mouse and keyboard.
Though it may succeed in displaying a lot of data, I’m not really satisfied with the overall look of the outcome. It feels like I cramped in too much information, losing control over its shape. Earlier, more abstract sketches displaying just a fraction of the data were much more pretty.
The “global” overview featured in the background/timeline is a visualization of the relative army sizes per country, divided by its population. Relative large armies generally signify a special situation.
Last summer I bought my first dSLR, and when I have time (not too often) I use this device to relax. I love prowling about, shooting everything that happens to be beautiful. It’s a wonderful way to empty my head of complicated concepts and problems and only care about light and color.
These are a few stills from interactive visualizations I’m working on.
Comparing different statistics of a country to its influence in the EP. This is visualized by a gravity model reflecting this statistic in the mass of the object representing each country. Hence less powerful countries are *influenced* by the bigger ones.
A still from the War Data project, using COW data. I’ve left the country code (red) and conflict number (white) coded as used in the COW set, to illustrate the weirdness of visualizing this kind of data in general. One can cycle through all incidents that occurred in the last two centuries.
As my Information Design teacher puts it, I was suffering from a case of the “circles and lines”… I hope I get better soon…
This video documents an installation we used to visualize the concept of abstracting nature by indexing it on its functionality only. An extreme point of view, taken to highlight the level of cultivation the new to be cosmopolis of Amsterdam, the Zuidas, aspires.
Sander Sturing and myself as representatives of the ArtEZ Art Academy developed the project in collaboration with the VU Architectural History, which provides us with the historical context.
My goal was to use the simple rules of perspective (objects in the distance appear to move slower) to create a rhytmic pattern for audio & visuals.
The projection is developed in processing in which a landscape photo is animated into moving slices which speed corresponds to their relative distance to a horizon. At present this creates the experience of watching from a train window.
The audio-part still sounds awful, but I’m currently focusing on optimizing the visual part. The illusion of depth is easily achieved, and in addition I shift colors to enhance the ‘eclipsing’ effect that occurs after a while when the slices come back in line. Watch the middle section, when it has completely shifted color, a ‘partial eclipse’ occurs, when it comes back to the initial color (cyan), all colors line up.
Here are some still frames (two partial & one nearing total eclipses) from the project:
Originally started as a personal project, an ongoing research into movement, I started separating RGB channels of shot footage. This technique I used earlier to obtain stereoscopic film, but this time the 3D component played no part. When B&W footage was split into its RGB components, a subtle delay of a few frames visualized motion by color appearing. Extending the delay time resulted in an upscaling from movement to dynamics. B&W represents static matter, while colors show dynamics.
Or with only a few frames delay, we detect motion:
While when we upscale the ‘delay’, each color channel represents it’s own timeline; there is virtually no black & white left, as the intensity of the sunshine in the red channel may differ from the other channels, shifting the color balance, resulting in coloring the grass blue…
The next step was to do this on the fly with live input. This project was written using Max/MSP+Jitter. The installation works live, delay adjustable on the fly, black & white imagery can be cancelled out:
The project has featured during the ArtEZ Arnhem Exhibition 2008, on KONIJN2000 and in Studio K. Maybe the biggest compliment has been that it was especially well received by junior spectators.
