The internet, however, provides artists with both a new challenge and a new set of resources in the field of information visualization. On the one hand, the information now available has grown tremendously in scope and complexity with the advent of the internet. But on the other hand, new media also provides artists and programmers with the tools to tackle this sudden wealth, and to develop tools for viewing and understanding the information in ways that are both simple and beautiful.
We are all now flooded with data from everything from blogs to news sites, from search engines to MySpace. But so immersed are we in this data, so complex is the web of information that we navigate, that it is difficult to step back and see the larger picture, to recognize and understand trends and patterns that emerge from the chaos. Thus the goal of the artists in this show is twofold: to create a practical tool for understanding an overwhelming amount of information, and to create also something that is aesthetically pleasing and entertaining to use.
Every one of these pieces is to some extent interactive. Each encourages the viewer to explore the information, to find patterns on their own and delve into their origins and into the connections between the separate pieces of data. All but one are also in real time, allowing the viewer to see the evolution of information, to watch the ebb and flow of certain patterns as they occur. Each succeeds at transforming the unique internet flood of constantly increasing, constantly changing data into something easily grasped and beautiful.
The artists of these works combine science with aesthetics to produce works that represent the fast-paced and ever-changing world of information in ways that are simple, revealing, and sometimes surprising.
From the artists of Stamen Design: “There’s something compelling in all of this. It’s not quite honesty—you can lie with charts and graphs as easily as with words or pictures. It’s not quite accidental discovery—this is pretty technical stuff, and deliberate choices are made at every step along the way. But there’s a quality to these generated pictures of information that’s seductive and fascinating and tends toward a delicate beauty.
There is magic in setting up a system that tracks the similarities and the differences between things, letting it run, and seeing what comes out the other end. Digital material, like clay on a potter’s wheel. It responds to the hand. It flows.”
80 Million Tiny Images
Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus and William T. Freeman.
2007
4920x2445 pixels
80 Million Tiny Images is a piece created by Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus, and William T. Freeman of MIT. The artists describe it as a visual dictionary, for it is a mosaic of images representing all of the nouns in the English language (53,464 in all). The artists entered each word into search engines such as Google Image and obtained 140 images to correspond to it. They then used a program to average all these images into a single square for each word. These squares make up the tiles of the mosaic and are arranged in a semantic hierarchy, so that they are grouped by similarity of meaning. One can click on each tiny square within the image to view the specific word, the averaged picture for that word, and the first 16 images that appear in a search for that word on Google Images.
Out of the mosaic of 53,464 squares and the amalgamation of 7,527,697 images, one can view all the nouns of the English language at once in an abstracted and colorful composition. The averaged image for each word, as the artists say, “reveals the dominant visual characteristics” of that word, while the grouping of words by semantic hierarchy allows larger patterns of meaning to emerge, so that one begins to draw connections between the closeness of meaning of two words and their visual similarity. Sometimes these patterns that emerge are predictable. For example, the grouping of plant names in the image creates a large green patch, while groupings of sea creatures create splotches of blue. At other times, however, these patterns are less predictable, and can sometimes bring to light surprising similarities and characteristics of words. Overall the effect is to create a quite beautiful and unique visual representation of the English language. 80 Million Tiny Images uses digital tools to take a highly complex scientific classification system and combine it with the wealth of information available on the internet to produce an image that is surprisingly simple given the depth and density of material represented. It would be seemingly impossible to view the interrelations of all the nouns of the English language at once, and even more so to at the same time see the corresponding visual similarities, and yet 80 Million Tiny Images succeeds in doing so with relative simplicity and ease.
Newsmap
Marcos Weskamp
launched 2004, ongoing
exhibited in ARS electronica in Linz, Austria, 2004
winner of Award of Distinction in Prix Ars Electronica 2004
The Newsmap by Marcos Weskamp is an application that provides the viewer with a real-time visual map of Google News. Headlines appear in boxes clustered and color coded by subject matter (World News, Sports, Business, etc.). Newer stories appear brighter, and the boxes the headlines appear in are larger or smaller depending on the relative number of related articles found by the Google News aggregator. The viewer can interact with Newsmap, choosing to view headlines from only a single category or to change the country of origin for the newsmap to a number of different countries (or an aggregate map from all these countries). As well as the live map, the application also contains an archive of maps preserved at intervals of six hours for the preceding week. The application is also practical, for all headlines are in fact links to the actual stories, just as on the original Google News page.
From the artist’s description: “Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.”
Indeed, Newsmap provides a unique way of presenting conventional information. From the grid of colored squares, patterns emerge, and trends are more apparent than they might be in the traditional Google News format. The piece is relatively simple aesthetically, being just a grid of colored blocks. In this clear visual format, one may view a large amount of information quickly, and understand overarching themes and patterns that might not otherwise be revealed. The Newsmap serves as a map not simply of the news but of history and culture. One can compare the trends in news reporting from country to country, culture to culture, and thus perhaps gain some understanding of these cultures and of the differences in the way in which they view the world. Or one may follow the trends in news reporting over the course of a week, observing the events of the world as they unfold, with stories that fluctuate,Indeed, Newsmap provides a unique way of presenting conventional information. From the grid of colored squares, patterns emerge, and trends are more apparent than they might be in the traditional Google News format. The piece is relatively simple aesthetically, being just a grid of waxing and waning and eventually fading entirely from view. Newsmap utilizes the wealth of information not only about news but also about society’s interaction with news that is only now available with the advent of internet technologies and sites like Google News to create a unique, clear picture of our ever-changing world. It applies aesthetics to the new way of interacting with the world that digital media provides to bring us also a new way of viewing at least one aspect of the world.
link to Marcos Weskamp's page
10x10
Jonathan Harris
launched 2004, ongoing
2005 Webby Award for Best Structure and Navigation
10x10™ ('ten by ten') is a work by Jonathan Harris. It is similar to Newsmap in that it provides a visual representation in real time of news stories sorted by relative importance. 10x10 gathers the 100 most important words from the 100 most important stories off of the Reuters, BBC World and New York Times International news websites, along with 100 corresponding images taken from these news sites. These images are then displayed in a ten by ten box along with the list of wards. This box is constantly updated, and thus shows an up-to-the-minute representation of the current state of the world in the news. One can also look back through the archives and view the 10x10 square for any given hour, day, month, or year since the project was launched. Clicking one of the pictures in the grid will open a box displaying the image and list of headlines linking to articles that correspond to the word. Thus 10x10 is also a practical tool for browsing and reading the current news.
From the artist’s statement: “10x10 runs with no human intervention, autonomously observing what a handful of leading international news sources are saying and showing. 10x10 makes no comment on news media bias, or lack thereof. It has no politics, nor any secret agenda; it simply shows what it finds.
With no human editors and no regulation, 10x10 is open and free, raw and fresh, and consequently a unique way of following world events. In 10x10, we respond instinctively to patterns in the grid, visual indicators of relevance. When we see a frequently repeated image, we know it’s important. When we see a picture of a movie star next to a picture of dead bodies, we understand the extremes that exist in our world. Scanning a grid of pictures can be more intuitive than reading headlines, for it lets the news come to life, and everything feels a bit less distant, a bit closer to heart, and maybe, if we're lucky, gives us pause to think.”
Much like Newsmap, 10x10 provides a kind of summary of the current state of world affairs. It displays in simple visual and textual form the complex and ever-changing workings of our world. In contrast to Newsmap, however, the use of photographs provides the viewer with a different, perhaps richer representation. As opposed to division by color into category, the use of actual images causes different patterns to emerge, and stories are linked across category. Contrasts, too, that occur when two radically different images appear directly adjacent to each other (the image of Britney Spears, for example, next to a scene of war) can serve to highlight the great spread of information that is both available and important to us. What may be difficult to navigate or understand as a broad picture in its original form becomes clearer with 10x10. The viewer can begin to notice trends, and can choose either to explore deeper into these connections or to simply view from a distance the history of our world as it unfolds.
link to Jonathan Harris' page
We Feel Fine
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
launched 2006, ongoing
exhibited in Manifesto/GenArt exhibition Prague, Czech Republic 2006
and Fabrica's "I've Been Waiting For You" Exhibition, Seoul, South Korea, 2006
2006 Pixel Award Winner
We Feel Fine is another piece created by Jonathan Harris this time in collaboration with Sep Kamvar as what they call “an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.” The piece is a program that continually scans the world’s blogs for phrases that begin with “I feel” or “I am feeling”. It takes these phrases, along with the age, gender, and location of the author and collects them in a database. If the blog post that a feeling comes from has a picture attached, then this too is saved and is shown with the phrase. One can then view these feelings in a number of different formats, each of which conveys a different kind of information. “Madness” shows as an animated scattering of points, color coded according to the type of feeling expressed. One can also choose to sort feelings by demographic, selecting the gender, age and location of the author, or even by the weather at the time the feeling was expressed. Viewers may also choose to view trends, and see which feelings are the most common on a certain day, or which cities are the happiest, among many other things.
The artists state: “At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life”
We Feel Fine provides a way to view these connections. Only with the internet does it become possible, through media such as blogs, for everyone to share their individual emotions and opinions. But this information is scattered across the web, and one can usually only view it one piece at a time, without access to the larger picture. We Feel Fine creates this larger picture, and is thus a tool that is at once both informative and beautiful. It taps into the potential that lies beneath the disorganized chaos of the blogosphere to bring theIf the internet provides us with new and more extensive ways to connect with the world, then viewer clear, graphical representations of the characteristics and feelings of various demographics (or at least the blog-using demographic). The piece is not purely scientific in form, and does not attempt or claim to make any significant discoveries. Rather it serves as a casual, playful, and aesthetically pleasing means of observation. Like all the works in this show, it allows the viewer to view the overwhelming amount of data available on the internet from a distance in a clear and simple picture, and thus notice trends and patterns that one might not otherwise ever see.
link to Sep Kamvar's page
link to Jonathan Harris' page
Digg Labs
Stamen Design
launched 2004, ongoing
Digg Labs is actually a series of related works produced by stamen design that each provide a unique way of viewing and accessing information as it is posted by users to the content sharing website Digg. Each program in Digg Labs provides a different real-time visual representation of the stories as they are posted and “dugg”. In the version called Swarm, for example, posts appear as circles, and as users “digg” them, each of these diggs appears as a yellow dot attached to the story. One can watch live as certain stories appear and are dugg and rise in popularity. Another program, Pics, specifically shows pictures as they are dugg, arranged in rows by category and appearing in sequence on the screen as they are dugg.
As with all the other pieces, patterns emerge from the chaos of information displayed. As the Digg Labs front page states, “a lot of stuff gets submitted to Digg every day, so good things can sometimes fly right past you. Labs projects look beneath the surface of the Digg community's activities.” Though the ways of representing information vary greatly in each of the Digg Labs’ projects, the result in each is the same. Each provide a clear, wide angle view of the fast-paced stream of highly varied information entering into the Digg website. The approach of stamen designs to these projects is as much aesthetic as it is scientific. The resulting representations are all simple and clear, but also visually appealing. The projects are also all as much practical as they are works of art. They serve as real tools for the Digg user to follow trends, find stories, and generally view the constant activity occurring on the site. The projects all allow the view to view not just the information that the internet provides, but also the way in which the internet provides this information. In using the Digg Labs applications one can clearly visualize the otherwise chaotic and somewhat mysterious process of information exchange that is at the core of it. We see not just the result, but the actual production behind it as well. One not only has access to data but can view from a distance its rapid spread, its ebb and flow from person to person, site to site, across the world.
link to Stamen Design page
