Frame That Spam! Data-Crunching Artists Transform the World of Information, an inter­ac­tive piece on wired.com, show­cases sev­eral beau­ti­ful exam­ples of art gen­er­ated from data. The usual crew are well-represented -- Aaron Koblin, Casey Reas -- plus some names that were new to me.

Many of the pieces are more artsy and less “design-y” than the work we do at DMI, sim­ply because the visu­al­iza­tions are intended to be more emo­tional than prac­ti­cal. I define prac­ti­cal as inter­pretable, mean­ing the data val­ues could be extracted from the visual ele­ments. A bar chart is eas­ily inter­pretable: the height of each bar (y) rep­re­sents a num­ber, and its hor­i­zon­tal posi­tion (x) reflects another value (time or some other group­ing). Waves and waves of tech­ni­color text, in con­trast, may be beau­ti­ful and evoke a gen­eral sense of the data involved, but is prob­a­bly not eas­ily inter­preted, except by the algo­rithm that drew it.

I keep strug­gling with this arti­fi­cial dis­tinc­tion between art and design, won­der­ing why emo­tional pieces are labeled art, while more osten­si­bly func­tional pieces are con­sid­ered design. Doesn’t good design evoke an emo­tional response? And can’t art­work be func­tional, too? I usu­ally iden­tify more as a designer than an artist, but I am begin­ning to ques­tion the use­ful­ness of both of those terms. Traditionally, art was more purely expres­sive, and design more data-driven, but now that we have “fine artists” doing inten­sively data-driven work, the dis­tinc­tion is start­ing to feel outdated.

Image credit: Detail from Textour by Tim Walter.

I’ve offi­cially sub­mit­ted my Search Explorer project to Rhizome’s 2009 com­mis­sions process! Watch the demo, and if you like what you see, I’d appre­ci­ate your vote!

Okay, so every­one in the type world has already posted a link to this, but go ahead -- try your hand at The Rather Difficult Font Game. (I scored a 28 on my first try.)

We reviewed our “ges­ture” projects in class last night, and while I think we all had some inter­est­ing ideas, no one envi­sioned an inter­face where your entire body could pro­vide the input.

I just found out about this project called “You Move You Interact,” described as:

…an inter­ac­tive instal­la­tion, where one is sup­posed to build up a body lan­guage dia­logue with an arti­fi­cial sys­tem so as to effec­tively achieve a syn­chro­nized per­for­mance between the real user’s body and the vir­tual object itself. The project aims at explor­ing a spa­tial sphere, where the user/performer is invited to develop his own cre­ative inspi­ra­tion based on his own body ges­tures and move­ments. [ymyi.org]

Also inter­est­ing: It’s done using Processing.

An inno­v­a­tive use of motion sen­sors and a famil­iar video game encour­ages coor­di­nated action on the part of oth­er­wise non-connected individuals.