prosthetic knowledge

Golden Parachutes by James Bills

Collection of abstract isometric mathematical artworks designed with rolling dice data - via Data Is Nature:

James Bills series of projection drawings, Golden Parachutes, are generated by random numbers obtained from a series of of polyhedral dice throws. Each aleotoric drawing uses a different system, indicated by its title (such as 1xRxR or 8x8xR), to translate those numbers into indeterminate isometric lattices characterised by spectrographic elevation columns. Gold leaf gilding punctuates the upper parts of these columns resulting in illuminated grids of squares that hover above the main architectural structures.

More at Data Is Nature Here

More works by James Bills Here

In-Store Facial Recognition Market Research 

New technology from Japan can monitor all shop visitors, discerning age, gender, and visiting frequency, and measures the data with a system called ‘NeoFace’, all with a normal PC and webcam - via DigInfo (video embedded below):

NEC has developed a marketing service that utilizes facial recognition technology to estimates the age and gender of customers, and accumulates the data, along with the dates and times that customers visit stores. This data is then used to analyze trends in customer behavior and visit frequency.

This service is provided in Japan via NEC’s cloud computing technology, only requires a regular PC and video camera, and is available for approximately $880 (70,000 yen) per month per store.

“This service is mainly intended for retailers that have several stores. It provides retailers with customer attributes based on facial images. That information is helpful for sales strategies.”

This service can also detect repeat customers across multiple stores. It uses a face detection and comparison engine developed by NEC, called NeoFace.

More Here

Data Driven Stories: Aaron Koblin for the Future of StoryTelling

Aaron Koblin discusses his high-profile web-based creative projects which have all been groundbreaking:

A sort of dreamscape unto itself, this film charts the creation of several of acclaimed artist Aaron Koblin’s most imaginative and game-changing projects, including the crowd-sourced music video for Johnny Cash’s song “Ain’t No Grave” and the user-customized short film “The Wilderness Downtown,” which is set to Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait” and was created entirely in HTML5. Koblin also describes the genesis and evolution of what may be his most groundbreaking work to date: “This Exquisite Forest,” a collaborative art project and online story generator (created with Chris Milk and the Tate Modern museum in London) built and nurtured by web users. Koblin’s remarkable oeuvre draws increasingly on the immense computing, storage, and data-sharing capabilities of the current generation of computers—as well as recent innovations like hardware-accelerated browser graphics—and demonstrates in the most vivid ways imaginable the infinite artistic and narrative possibilities of crowdsourced digital creation and autonomous storytelling.

More Here

McKnight Artist Fellows: Visualizing Artists’ Careers 

Visualizing data from artist’s careers (publications, exhibitions, years etc) into animated information visualizations:

In the 30th year of the McKnight Artist Fellowship program, we wanted to see what the artists had been up to. We used data from résumés to create diagrams showing the professional histories of 120 amazing artists, each one as distinct as the individual artists’ careers.

More Here [Via the highly recommended roomthily]

Process Watch by Katja Novitskova 

Digital print for one-day art show featuring a collage of infographic data of that day:

On June 27th 2012 I did Hotel Palenque, a curatorial project of Elise Lammer. Hotel Palenque is about inviting an artist to do a one-day show that proposes two conditions: making an A0 print, and deleting the files used to make it.

Process Watch is a digital collage inframed in a outdoor poster display with two key-locks. Collage was made a few hours before the opening out of several types of real-time data from the day of the exhibition: weather reports from various cities around the world, currency exchange rates, stock exchange statistics, commodity prices, satellite footage, Moon phase and location, etc. The data gathered in the form of screenshots from the internet was then assembled in Photoshop. Fundamentally unique occurence of particular weather and economic conditions of the day were further intensified by freehand digital tool use. The print is locked in a frame and will exist as a singular piece - a document to the reality of the moment and a product of the conditions that led to it.

More Here

Female Orgasm in Brodmann Brain Regions 

Visualization of stimulation in the brain with scans taken over a seven minute sequence - via The Visual MD:

The human brain can be separated into regions based on structure and function - vision, audition, body sensation, etc, known as Brodmann’s area map.

This animation shows the functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, brain data of a participant experiencing an orgasm and the corresponding relationships seen within these different regions based on utilization of oxygen levels in the blood. 20 snapshots in time of the fMRI data are taken from a 7 minute sequence. Over the course of the 7 minutes the participant approaches orgasm, reaches orgasm and then enters a quiet period.

Oxygen utilization levels are displayed on a spectrum from dark red (lowest activity) to yellow/white (highest). As can be observed, an orgasm leads to almost the entire brain illuminating yellow, indicating that most brain systems become active at orgasm.

You can see the video at the The Visual MD here [via The Guardian UK]

Glitch Embroidery 

Project found at 割かとナイスコミュニケート which (appears) to create clothing with embroidered logos, whose sewing machine files were corrupted to output glitched stitching.

”Glitch Embroidery” incorporates ‘Glitched’ (Binary Hacked) embroidery data for a sewing machine.

You can see more examples (and GIFs) here

Camera to PC Spatial 3D Data Method From Photos 

Project in early stages from Tokyo to quickly digitally reproduce 3D objects from photographs. What differs this to Autodesk 123 Catch is the photographic information is transferred locally to PC over Eye-Fi card as opposed to the cloud. From DigInfo News:

A research group at Tokyo Institute of Technology is developing a system that quickly creates 3D spacial data from photos taken with a digital camera.

“We take pictures using an ordinary digital camera. This camera has an Eye-Fi card, which sends the pictures to a PC wirelessly. This system uses the received pictures to rapidly create a 3D model. A feature of this system is that it doesn’t use any information other than the pictures to construct the 3D data.”

“Other people are researching similar systems. What we’re specializing in is the online aspect. In other words, what’s interesting is, you see the results as soon as you’ve taken the pictures. For example, when aerial photos are processed after saving them, if you need to take more pictures, you have to go out again. But with our system, you can see on the spot whether 3D measurement was successful, so if you don’t have enough pictures, you can just take some more.”

This system uses SfM, or Structure from Motion, which estimates the 3D shape and camera position from several pictures of the same scene. To reproduce spatial position data, it repeatedly identifies and matches characteristic points between two pictures.

More information (including a demonstration video) can be found at DigInfo News here

(PS - DigInfo has been great recently - worth checking regularly)

The Sound of a Fermi Gamma-ray Burst 

The NASA blog has posted a video, turning the above data-capture graph of ‘a gamma-ray burst, the most energetic explosions in the universe’ (above) into a piece of music:

What does the universe look like at high energies? Thanks to the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), we can extend our sense of sight to “see” the universe in gamma rays. But humans not only have a sense of sight, we also have a sense of sound. If we could listen to the high-energy universe, what would we hear? What does the universe sound like?

… In translating the gamma-ray measurements into musical notes we assigned the photons to be “played” by different instruments (harp, cello, or piano) based on the probabilities that they came from the burst. This particular conversion is a fairly simple one; We built this on work done by other members of the LAT team (Luca Baldini and Alex Drlica-Wagner) who explored converting our data into music in different ways.

In the beginning of the song, before the burst starts, the harp plucks out a few lonely notes. After about half a minute, the piano joins in on top of the harp background, and the notes begin to pile on more and more rapidly. The cello enters the scene as the burst begins in earnest.

More Here

The Solar Annual Report, Powered By The Sun 

A solar power data report document which only reveals it’s contents in sunlight. Video below:

Austria Solar Annual Report, powered by the sun from mnoesel on Vimeo.

Solar energy is the main business of our client Austria Solar. That´s why we thought about how we could put this energy to paper. The result: the first annual report powered by the sun. Its content remains invisible until sunlight falls on its pages.

[Source]

Plant-In City 

Art installation merges gardening and technology, creating Arduino-powered frames with sensors for plants to be monitored, and interacted with via smartphone app. From the project’s Kickstarter page:

We’re creating a space where a community who loves architecture, technology and plants can meet. Our mission is to integrate these disciplines into a new paradigm that changes the way we live and interact with nature. We believe that interacting with plants will improve our lives.

Plant-in City taps into the natural systems that foster plant life to give the plants themselves a voice. This revolutionary planter system contains built-in sensors that are activated by sun exposure, changes in soil moisture, humidity, temperature, and other natural cycles. Once activated, these sensors translate the environmental data into sounds or visuals, creating an imaginary vibrant wilderness.

More about the project can be found here

Point Cloud 

Mechanical installation is a wireframe form which adjusts it’s shape according to a weather data feed. Video below:

Point Cloud is an attempt to reimagine our daily interaction with weather data. Weather has always had a unique place in our lives, because it has a multiplicity that encompasses both the concrete and the indeterminate. It is the intangible context within which we build our lives and our cities, but it is also the physical element against which we create protective shelter. Most of the time it is an invisible network that we can see but are not aware of; yet it can manifest in a spectacle or disaster, come forward and activate our senses, make us forget our rationality in delight or fear. With modern scientific and technological developments, we can now deploy sophisticated monitoring devices to document and observe weather. Yet despite these advances, our analysis and understanding of meteorology is still largely approximate, and in many cases, inaccurate. Weather continues surprise us and elude our best attempts to predict, control, and harness the various elements.

In contrast, however, the nuances of weather’s continuously shifting states are largely oversimplified as the information is transmitted into our daily experience. Our various home and mobile devices most likely distill a forecast into static representations, such as numeric values or simple infographics of sun, clouds, or rain. There is a deep discrepancy between the flatness of the visualizations we are accustomed to, and the rich mixture of tactility and perceptibility of our immediate physical experience. As a critical response to these issues, Point Cloud emerges as a sculptural form defined by a thin wire mesh, driven asynchronously by 8 individual servos controlled via Arduino. As whiteness of the hanging structure begins to disappear into the background, the viewer is treated to a constantly morphing swarm of black points dancing through midair.

More at the project’s Vimeo page + Flickr page

Meshu 

Personalized jewelery created using personal Foursquare check-in data:

http://meshu.io/

Ending Overfishing 

Video short on the problems of overfishing in the EU, using data and simple triangular graphics like the image above: