prosthetic knowledge

Microsonic Landscapes

3D-Printed music visualizations of modern albums. Using Processing, each album’s soundwave was analysed and created a unique visual form. The albums are: Jewels by Einstürzende Neubauten, Another World by Antony and the Johnsons, Pink Moon by Nick Drake, Third by Portishead, and the composition “Für Alina” by Arvo Pärt.

An algorithmic exploration of the music we love. Each album_s soundwave proposes a new spatial and unique journey by transforming sound into matter/space: the hidden into something visible.

More can be found at the project’s website here

Hypercube 

Computer animation from 1965 demonstrating the concept of the 4D ‘Hypercube’, which could be viewed as a stereogram - video embedded below:

From AT&T Archives:

Two of the earliest three-dimensional computer graphics films. The films’ creator, A. Michael Noll, programmed the computer (most of this work in the Labs was done on an IBM 7094) to generate the correct stereoscopic imagery, and these images were printed side-by-side, frame by frame. They’re intended for freeviewing in 3D — i.e. the three-dimensional image is created when one views the film while cross-eyed — no special devices required. Of course, the time/movement elements bring the film into the fourth dimension. 

More info 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]

Tumble Tree

For Tumblr users only … Great Bookmarklet tool to visualize and graph interactions from your individual posts, by dxinteractive (whose GIF above demonstrates it incredibly well):

Introducing Tumble Tree! ~ Check out this thing I made that lets you see how posts are reblogged across Tumblr. It works on the dashboard or on most permalink pages, and you can sproing the branches around, filter notes by comments, save the tree as a picture blah blah blah. I’ve been using and testing it for the last couple of weeks and it’s pretty handy.

Go to tumble-tree.tumblr.com to try it out and install it. I guarantee you probably won’t die!

P.S. Yes this is why I haven’t posted much in the last couple of weeks.

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]

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

Covers

Chrome browser-only online experiment uses a selection of album covers and turns them into real-time audio visualizations:

Css3 / JS albums artworks with realtime music analytics thanks to beatdetektor.js 

There are only a few at the moment, with more being worked on. You can try it out for yourself here

Graffiti & Street Art Flowchart Timeline by Pantheon Projects

Ending Overfishing 

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

Social Network Clock

Time-based visualization of social network activity based on bitly data, by retronator:

Today’s random idea to create a webpage: the Social Network Clock!

A few weeks back bitly posted some interesting data that hints when people use different social networks. Today’s stupid idea for not playing Minecraft all day involved creating a CSS3 time display webpage that overlays current time over the graphs published by bitly.

Tumblr is apparently the party network for evenings and weekends so cheers to you guys!

Link

FatFont

Specifically designed for decimal numbers whose boldness corresponds with it’s value, for use in data visualization:

The FatFonts technique is based on a new type of numeric typeface designed for visualization purposes that bridge the gap between numeric and visual representations. FatFonts are based on Arabic numerals but, unlike regular numeric typefaces, the amount of ink (dark pixels) used for each digit is proportional to its quantitative value. This enables accurate reading of the numerical data while preserving an overall visual context. 

Fatfonts are designed so that the amount of dark pixels in a numeral character is proportional to the number it represents … This proportionality of ink is the main property of FatFonts. It allows us to create images of data where you can read the numbers, and represent tables that can be read as images.

You can find out more about the project here

Visualization: Movies of Wong Kar-Wai 

Frame sheets of the directors films put together by Benjamin Wimmer:

With The Grandmasters finally having a release date (2012/12/18) I thought it would be nice to do a recap of Wong Kar-wai’s feature films. As IMHO his movies are primary made for being experienced rather than discussed/analysed, I thought I’d go for visual summaries:

Below, his movies compressed to single pictures (ever 60th frame was used) showing nicely the movies’ pace as well their overall colour schemes. Enjoy. 

Above are:

1. Chungking Express
2. As Tears Go By
3. Days Of Being Wild
4. In The Mood For Love

There are more of these frame sheets, which can be found here.

UPDATE: Benjamin has upload a ZIP file containing hires versions of the collection, available here

Fleshmap 

Data visualization project exploring the body and desire:

We asked hundreds of people how much they like being caressed on various parts of their body, and how exciting it is to touch different places on their lovers. Their answers, a total of 33,871 ratings covering 707 points on male and female bodies, provide a collective portrait of desire. In Skin to Skin, compare men and women, touching and being touched. In Sorting out Desire, explore an atlas of excitement.

To produce a collective portrait of desire, we polled hundreds of people’s opinions about parts of the body. To do so, we teamed up with Dolores Labs to crowdsource the data gathering step through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site—a marketplace where paid workers perform simple tasks. This means that we set up an open call to anyone on the Mechanical Turk site who was interested in answering questions about desire and the human body.

You can see the results of the surveys at Fleshmap site here (and from the developers here)

Spectrogram 

Online browser-based circular music visualizer for Soundcloud tracks.

Top image is a full visual of Fame Boozer by TOKiMONSTA + Rucyl, bottom image is a partial visual for nonprojects ‘Ryan York - “If I Am This Forest”’, the example track that is used for this site.

Try it here: http://spectrogr.am/

You can try using other Soundcloud audio tracks by adding the part of a Soundcloud URL that features /artist/track to the end of the spectrogr.am URL

(ie http://spectrogr.am/nonprojects/01-if-i-am-this-forest)

Everywhere I’ve Been: Data Portraits Powered by 3.5 years of data and 2.5 million GPS Points 

Data visualizations by Aaron Parecki capturing years of collected GPS information:

These are images of map generated entirely from GPS logs gathered by various versions of the Geoloqi sample application for iPhone and Android for the past 3.5 years. Once gathered, the data was run through a custom script that projects the GPS logs onto a 2D image plane. There is a little bit of logic to smooth out the lines and remove some (but not all) GPS noise.

Approximately one GPS point was recorded every 2-6 seconds when I was moving, and these images represent about 2.5 million total GPS points. Collectively, they represent a data portrait of my life: everywhere I’ve been and the places I’ve been most frequently. The map is colored by year, so you can see how my footprint changes over the years, depending on where I live.

More information here