Design by Numbers

On my latest quick trip to London, I made some time to head to the Vitoria & Albert museum to see a new exhibit entitled Decode: Digital Design Sensations, produced in conjunction with onedotzero, a digital arts organization.  Touted as "the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small, screen-based, graphics to large-scale interactive installations."

It was a very interesting combination of a number of different art/technology mediums, using computers to collect, react and interpret collections of data.  Along with the interactive pieces which allowed for immediate interaction, my favorite piece was a digital interpretation of flight patterns by Aaron Koblin "an artist specializing in data visualization. His work takes social and infrastructural data and uses it to depict cultural trends and emergent patterns."

Using a program called Processing - available via open source distribution - Koblin took FAA data of flight plans to produce a 24 hour time lapse map of flights over North America.  The final product is a visually stunning piece of art you can view below.


I highly recommend clicking here to view it in full screen.

When you start digging deep enough, there are all sorts of little treasures on the web, like Kobin/Processing produced Radiohead video for 'House of Cards' or the hundreds of videos in the Processing group on YouTube.  Watching these made me think of an earlier post featuring a Jay-Z video.