Visualization – Page 2 – Kristen Baumlier

Category: Visualization

Partnered: We Are All Pests, A Responsive Sound Installation with Termites

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Kbaumlier

Artist Brittany Ransom writes,” You are a pest, one of the most expansive, destructive, and wasteful of creatures. Together with your own kind you will run yourselves extinct. Eventually you will run out of clean air, water, space and resources to survive.”

Her piece Partnered: We Are All Pests, explores this idea through a sonic floor installation that is a 9 foot by 9 foot pine floor that houses three termite enclosures. Each of the enclosures is filled with sculpted paper forms that are primarily made from human paper waste products (newspapers, paper cups, plates, phonebooks, copies of the artists electrical and gas bills, etc.) that are structurally similar to termite colony construction.

The termites are housed in these enclosures and naturally eat away at the paper forms. As termites consume paper, they digest them and naturally release hydrogen gas, a process which takes human wastes and transforming and recycling them into usable materials. This process of the release of this hydrogen gas and its production through the bacteria in the termite’s body is currently being investigated as a potential source of energy by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The viewer is invited to stand, sit, or lay on the custom sonic floor. By standing on or engaging with the piece, the sound of the termites decomposing the paper waste forms is amplified and heard acoustically by the viewers in real time. The floor becomes a sonic plane.

The piece explores levels of decay, human waste, and explores how humans can collaborate with other species to create renewable energy. The piece recently got Honorable Mention in the Creative Divergence showcase, an online showcase of experimental creative works. You can read more about Ransom’s work on her website, and also see a video on Vimeo where you can hear the termites, and see individuals interacting with the work.

Image Source:
brittanyransom.com

Links:

Partnered: We Are All Pests – Video Documentation

brittanyransom.com

Years – A Record Player That Can Read Tree Rings

Posted on February 13, 2012February 13, 2012 by Kbaumlier

Tree-rings can tell us stories about the lives of trees. Tree rings can be analyzed for strength, thickness and rate of growth. This information can give clues about the growth rate of the tree, and give information about droughts, fires, floods, or other natural events.

German artist Bartholomäus Traubeck has created a record-player which is capable of digitally reading tree-slices and translating them into piano music. This record-player, called “Years,” plays slices of woods and uses the program Arduino to transform the rings into sounds. For the piece, a camera takes an image of the tree ring and sends this to Arduino, a electronic programming and processing tool. Traubeck programmed Arudiono to interpret the tree ring in terms of thickness, strength, and rate of growth which is mapped to a scale of the overall appearance of the wood. This information is then mapped to piano sounds.

In the videos of the piece on Vimeo, you can see that the player plays various tree disks including a fir tree and an ash tree with a complex texture.

The resulting sounds piece is an interesting interpretation of trees and sound.

Image Source:
Years – on Vimeo

Links:

Years – See and Hear on Vimeo

Bartholomäus Traubeck Website

Years on Creative Applications.net

Cowbird: A New Online Storytelling Tool

Posted on December 23, 2011December 28, 2011 by Kbaumlier

On November 28th, Cowbird launched a new online storytelling tool called Cowbird. Cowbird is a community of storytellers – who have a goal to tell deeper, longer-lasting pieces than what is on the web. The site started with an online piece called The Occupy Saga and the Story of the 99%, and the team behind the site writes that the tool is meant to provide a “slower” space for self-reflection and a place for personal connections.

I checked out the Occupy Wall Street story- and the images and amount of information and stories on the site provides a broader and bigger view of the Occupy movement. With full size photographs and individual accounts of Occupy events – it was an easy to use interactive platform where I could read about events in Zuccotti Park, Portland, Oakland, and other locations on one site. I also could choose to experience the stories through images or by reading the stories.

The website allows users to create a audio-visual diary, and to collaborate in documenting stories or what the site calls “sagas”. Sagas would include events like the Japanese earthquake, the war in Iraq, and the Occupy Wall Street movement – things that affect millions of lives and human history.

The project aims to make a new participatory journalism which focuses on collecting individual stories behind news events and large themes. The site aims to create a “public library” of human experience so that the information, knowledge, and experiences are available in an area called the commons, for future generations to be able to experience and learn from.

The online tool is unique, in that it provides a platform for full-screen photos, modern typography, infographics, hand-drawn iconography, and a non-distracting environment to support the viewer to be able to experience stories in a “360 degree” perspective. Viewers can view the stories in various views including by timeline, places, “characters,” and stories.

To start a Cowbird diary, you can request an invitation by submitting information about yourself, proposing the stories you would like to tell, and links to any of your past work.

Links:

Cowbird – cowbird.com

The Occupy Saga— the story of the 99% on on Cowbird

Occupy Design – Building a Visual Language for the 99 Percent

Posted on November 28, 2011November 28, 2011 by Kbaumlier

Occupy Design is a grassroots project that connects designers with demonstrators in the Occupy Together movement. The goal of the project is to create freely available visual graphics around a common graphic language to unite the 99%. A common set of used universal icons, logistical signs, and infographics can help support the communication of the movement’s messages and the data surrounding them across the world.

The Occupy Design site has a gallery of existing designs, a how-to guide for demonstrators, a graphic toolkit for designer who want to contribute graphics for the project and a interactive form for the community to suggest ideas for designers.

The project was created in less than 24 hours in October by a team of designers, programmers, artists, and demonstrators in San Francisco as part of three concurrent creative hackathons across the country to support Occupy Together. During the planning process, the team spoke with demonstrators who described their needs. The three main areas of the project are infographic protest signs, logistical signs, and visual icons around social justice themes. The focus on infographics is to support bringing graphic representation of statistical evidence to the front and center on the ground – rather than just on computer screens.

Currently the magazine/website GOOD has partnered with Occupy Design to encourage designers to create a design, icon, or infographic that shares the unifying spirit of the Occupy movement. Individuals and organizations can participate.

All submitted designs will be voted on by the online community. $750 from the GOOD Fund will be used to support Occupy Design to print and distribute the winning design, and the winner will receive their design printed on a vinyl weatherproof sign, several 11×17 prints, and get an Occupy Design t-shirt.

In addition, you can download the Occupy Design Design Toolkit which includes digital templates, logos, and fonts.

Are you a designer and part of the 99%? Take some time today and get working on a graphic for Occupy Design today.

Image Source:
Occupy Design

Links:

Occupy Guide for Designers

Occupy Design

Call to Design: The GOOD + Occupy Design Challenge

Occupy Together

A View from Inside a Flower: Rectified Flowers

Posted on November 23, 2011November 23, 2011 by Kbaumlier

Image rectification is a transformation process where technology is used to combine two or more images into one larger image. Using mapped coordinates and math equations – the distortion in an image can be transformed and images can be “stitched” together. Images taken from different perspectives or viewpoints can be made into one larger image.

In 2010, media artists Golan Levin and Kyle McDonald were reading about domain shifting of polar and Cartesian geometries, and noticed that flowers make interesting subjects for this transformation.

Using Levin’s open-source panoramic-imaging software that he created with some flower photographs from Flickr, they produced “flower panoramas.”

The images were made from Flickr images, and the software is available as free Open Source code. The software was made with Processing and the the ControlP5 library.

The images created are visualizations of what a person would see from inside a flower.

The resulting images sometimes look like flowers from outer space or a view of a flower as if we are a small insect inside.

Links:

Rectified Flower Images on Flickr

Rectified Flowers page and Software Download

Golan Levin

Kyle McDonald