A couple of weekends ago I had the pleasure of spending two days locked in a very dark hot room learning to program. Sounds pretty excruciating doesn’t it – But believe me it wasn’t. Just a bit of background – I used to be a jack-of-all-trades developer and hung up my coding gloves because I was bored with building the same ole websites over and over and over again. (Back then Web 1.0 was a bit dull).
So back to OpenFrameworks. I met Joel Gethin Lewis last year when we were building the Christmas Card Making Machine and he introduced me to how he was doing face tracking and all this sexy stuff. He was writing everything in OpenFrameworks and I was astounded to learn this wasn’t some fancy custom solution he had used when he was at U.V.A, but a free open source system.
To explain what OpenFrameworks is, I’m going to be a bit simplistic so bear with me – It is basically a way of wrapping up all the really really nasty bits to do with programming graphics, sound, interaction etc and opening this up so with a few lines of code you can load in images, have them move around, control them etc. It was astoundingly simple.
Zach Lieberman and Theo Watson the lead developers of the project have created community which was born out of a desire to ease new comers into the complexities of programming. The other beautiful part of this equation is that the community actively develop and put code back into the eco-system. Open source programming is not a new thing, but it is incredibly interesting to see this in more competitive artist circles (as generally OpenFrameworks is used to create installations and art projects) and along with Processing there is a whole new breed interactive artists doing great work.
The course was held at UCL and was setup by Ruairi who runs the excellent Interactive Architecture site and Joel and the multi talented Memo Atken were running the course. The ratio of architects on the course was very high and this was really interesting to find out what they are doing with code when it comes to designing buildings – They are all very keen on generating whole buildings from code. Little snippets of a process can be fed into a generative loop and out will pop a whole building – This is staggering stuff and for them incredibly liberating. Let’s just hope they don’t become too seduced by the computer as buildings need that irrevernce that lifts them.
New York Times – I believe they were the first newspaper to open their content via an API.
Wattson – If you’ve ever wanted to know how much electricity you consume then the Wattson is for you – You clip it to your electricity supply and it collates all the usage info. You can then interface with the API to start to play with the data.
Pachube – Taking the Wattson to a much higher level – Pachube is a dataset collated from buildings – Lots of environmental data to play with – building temperatues, humidity, lights. Building 2.0 here we come.
Last.FM – The API has exposed a mass of user data regarding music usage.
Flickr - Photographs on tap with a very comprehensive API. Very well documented.
Tools (Any further recommendations please send my way as this list is no means definitive)
Processing – The environment of all the experts – I think processing is very easy to pick up and learn but you will need to work at writing code. The forthcoming ‘Beautiful Data’ book might be a good way in.
Many Eyes – A very usable way to create quite straightforward datavisualisations – Created by IBM.
Flare – A set of libraries for Flash which let you prototype visualisations – you do need Flash knowledge for this.
Arduino – Linking physical objects to the internet a la ‘Physical Internet’ has really started to interest me and there is a growing crowd of people ‘Doing it with others’ – The Arduino is a very simple to use piece of electronics that can be flashed to control devices or transmit data to the internent. Thanks to Make and Instructables – There has never been an easier time to break out the soldering iron and get building.
Yahoo Pipes- Even non coders can start to play with data – Using Yahoo pipes you can take all sorts of data feeds and aggregate them together to manipulate them.
Flowing Data – Nathan is a curator of data and stats – Flowing data is a superb resource for more traditional forms of data vis. He also created ‘your flowing data’ which is a system of capturing data through a mobile interface and twitter. Sort of like daytum.
Marius Watz – A great fine artist in his own right – Marius has explored ways of rendering data as physical forms – his wood etchings are beautiful. When exploring visualising stock data for the Knight Capital Group, the end result have an aesthetic of an atom bomb going off. He also runs the generator.x generative art site, vimeo and flickr groups where you can spend hours taking in the work.
Jer Thorp – If anyone can make beauty out of the new york times then Jer can – His use of the NY Times API as a dataset has started to reveal some inspiring visuals. If you want to get your hands dirty then there are two tutorials to play with – one for the NY Times and one for the Guardian. His recent work ‘Just Landed’ shows how twitter can be mapped to location.
Jonathan Harris / Sep Kamvar – Gleaning emotion and sentiment from the internet and displaying this is a damn hard thing. Making an emotive art piece out of this mass of information is even harder and Jon and Sep continually do this. ‘We Feel Fine’ and ‘I Want You To Be Me’ are two examples of how they visualise emotion scraped from the ether.
Advanced Beauty – Matt Pyke curated twenty motion pieces exploring ‘synasthesia‘ – visualisaing sound. Many of the pieces are based on generative art processes and are showcases for cutting edge motion graphics artists.
Jason Bruges – Jason Bruges heads up an architectural design studio exploring visualising data created in realtime by physical interaction.Some very simple interactions such as wind powering lights or displaying the latent imprint of lift usage by hacking into the building lift interface – Very exciting stuff.
Ben Fry – In my opinion one of the founding fathers of modern data vis and co-created processing – His body of work is staggering and he currently heads up the Seed Media Group.
Casey Reas – Also co-created processing with Ben Fry and has exhibited many generative art pieces in traditional gallery spaces.
Robert Hodgin- I’ve been a massive fan of Robert for more years than I can remember as he is a leading experimental flash designer and coder. He creates pure beautiful eye candy.
Golan Levin – Another artists exploring visualising emotions – ‘The Dumpster’ was a great piece. It scanned the internet for comments about relationships breaking and then visualised them. His physical interaction pieces are hilarious – check ‘Snout’.
Ear Studio – I first encountered ‘Listening Post’ last year at the Science Museum – it was hidden in a dark corner and it was just transfixing – It was a bank of small screens that spoke back snippets from the millions of posts on chat rooms across the internet – effectively giving the internet a spooky synthesised voice.
UVA – A great design studio playing with light, sound, space and architecture.
Marcus Wendt – Marcus and the field.io team are not classical data vis but they are doing some stunning generative artworks.
Pitch Interactive – A really interesting interactive design agency doing some some great vis work.
If ‘Data visualisation is the new rock’n’roll’ then coders are the new rockstars. Code for me is natural – I’ve been playing for quite a few years but I was never really into exploring data visualisation – Mid last year I was fortunate enough to be given a dream project and I produced the ‘Beautiful Connections’ campaign for Nokia which explored visualising the beauty of everyday conversation.
This allowed me to reconnect with a lot of people I had admired from afar as we used data visualisation, generative art, motion and code to start to explore this space – honestly we’ve got a lot more exploration to do. So in my travels I worked with some exceptional people and also made contact with a whole scene and started to see the ’scenes within the scenes’.
I don’t believe that data visualisation is just the expression of a static data set in a graphical way to try and glean an insight – To me it is taking any data set – static or realtime and expressing this is any other way in any medium.
So lets talk about people (who I think are exploring interesting visualisations with code and interaction), data (what datasets are out there to use), and tools (how to get your hands dirty).
‘The Physical Internet’ as a buzz phrase has been thrown about a fair bit recently and only really recently have I seen things start to get interesting. I really like the idea of making the internet tangible and a flipside to this is taking a real world interaction and broadcasting this onto the net. A few things have made this much more attainable ->
1) Twitter and other systems have opened up to let other systems interact through them via an API to send/retrieve data.
2) Electronics such as arduino or ioBridge have made the geeky electronics bit much easier.
3) Programming interfaces such as Processing or Openframeworks have made the geeky programming bit much easier.
Here is a little recap of some interesting/useful/useless/fun interfaces.
An ordinary office chair – you let out a little bottom burp and a twitter status gets updated. I kid you not. It actually uses a methane gas sensor and some amazing hacking skills to work.
Fed up with waiting around for your toast to be done – well now your toaster tweets when that bready goodness is ready. Poke London did a much higher tech version of this recently – Baker Tweet.
A baby growing and moving inside a mothers womb is a special experience that the father doesn’t have to miss out on – A sensor is hidden inside a rather stylish garment which is wrapped round the waist of the mother and every ‘kick’ by the baby is broadcast to twitter.
Want to know if aliens are invading the earth? Take one fire alarm – The New York Times API and a bit of hacking and you have your very own aliens detector. The system works by monitoring the New York Times and if 50% of the articles are about aliens then 85db of screeching alarm will alert you to the fact – totally ridiculous but genius all the same.
Putting an RFID on a cat flap is a great way to keep naughty neighbourhood cats from eating their way into your house as the flap only opens if your cat is at the door – but who not hook this upto a twitter feed so you can track the comings and goings of your feline friends.
I actually would love to extend this to put a GPS or RFID on a cat and track where it goes to on its prowl – I bet this would be surprising how far they go.
Forget augmented reality cars, cars, cars – Try an interface to the world – one where you can turn lights on and off. Totally impractical for the moment but still mind-bogglingly clever. Uses PTAM from Oxford University.
Interactive installation work is really becoming really interesting of late as more brands commision work and more design studios are born out of the frustration of working in one medium – really blurring the lines between art/architecture/design/interaction. A great way to introduce yourself to this world is with the upcoming Kinetica Art Fair.
Kinetica Art Fair is developed by Kinetica Museum in partnership with P3 and supported by the Contemporary Art Society.
More than 25 galleries and organisations specialising in kinetic, electronic and new media art are taking part with over 150 exhibiting artists. The Fair will be like no other with living, moving, speaking and performing art.
The Fair provides unparalleled opportunities for the public and collectors alike to view and buy work from this thriving international movement and to participate in the programme of talks, workshops and performances.
It’s on from friday 27th -> monday 2nd in London town and the lineup of speakers and performances looks great.
Take an angelpoise, a webcam, a laptop and a book. Throw in some gorgeous illustration and a smattering of augmented reality and you have a beautiful way of animating reality.
What separates this from other augmented reality treaments is that there is no tracking marker present.
It is an interactive installation in our office window where your face gets motion tracked in realtime onto one of 12 slightly bizarre xmas characters. The website then lets you find your face and create a personal christmas card around it.
The face tracking system was written by Joel Gethin Lewis (ex UVA) and written in open frameworks. The behind the scenes system is actually very funny to watch as you see peoples reactions to the window. Overall it is a very simple system which I’m really proud to have helped bring together. Come on down and have a go.
