http://vimeo.com/33791755


This is one of those videos that are incredibly visually arresting – as I was watching the video, I could feel my eyes start to drift out of focus and concentrate on the movement and color of the entire mass while listening to the sharp accents of the piano chords. However, what also popped into my imagination was if this could somehow be a kind of immersive physical experience, the movement of the particles could be the movement of many people walking through the space and the piano chords replaced by excited conversation or perhaps punctuations of laughter. I think with a lot of these projects, exploring how to manifest them into physical experience could yield fantastically more engaging and memorable results.

http://vimeo.com/14219338



I love this particular project, especially the layers of depth to the events that take place. At first glance it may seem like a simple demo of interactivity, but in fact there exists more than meets the eye. I think that is crucial, having layers of meaning that requires a little more investment in time, but in the end having a much larger memorable impact. It’s the story. You always have to have a story.

http://infosthetics.com/archives/2011/12/visualizing_cpu_utilization_of_a_large_scale_data_center.html





A pretty neat example of how creating a tool for a mundane purpose can actually be a work of art. In this particular project Branden Gregg created a visualization software to monitor how 6000 virtual CPU’s were performing. I would love to be able to whip out a piece of code like this to use as a mere tool! No matter how utilitarian this may seem, I think what drew me in was its foundation in something that had purpose. In other words, it wasn’t meant to be a cool art project with a sophisticated emotional meaning, it just is what it is and it looks good doing it. Perhaps it’s another one of those form follows function arguments again?