What: I was recently (last 2 months or so) introduced to the tulip mania of the Dutch Golden Age. Tulips, at the peak of the period sold for more than 10 times the wages of a skilled craftsmen in the Dutch empire, or what is today approximately 1 million dollars. One day in February, the prices of tulips fell like a brick: from 100s of thousands to a few dollars. the Dutch, who created capitalism, had the first ever Speculative Bubble and the first ever ‘bubble crash’. I think that this is extraordinarily compelling. That the pitfalls of modern civilizations were realized and forgotten, is something I wish to talk about in my Data-Visualization.
How: I envision a very long flowering bed of tulips installed in a place for everyone to see. I want to plant the tulips according to set intervals during the climactic peak and fall of the Dutch tulip mania.
I believe that this is an interesting subject and I want to create this installation with a mix of beauty and gravity.
In my last post, I was mixing and matching generativity and infoVis, and this post is really no different — hopefully between the two, I’ll have delivered a complete blogpost on both topics.
Heartbeats — realistically.
A powerful and biologically accurate simulation of the beating human heart, with applications in medicine, pharmacology, and general awesomeness. This is great data viz on a number of levels, from the code to the graphics to the articulate video describing the purpose of the simulation. What I particularly love about this model is that despite the complexity of the mathematics and biological phenomena involved on the back end — and without abandoning that complexity — the researchers have created a simulation that is so aesthetically pleasing, in a way mirrors the deceptively simple elegance of the human body itself. How many people actually realize that heartbeats are this nuanced?
I’m a little bit bitter about anything in InfoVis that tackles Shakespeare, mostly because I’ve done a bunch of meddling with it myself, and then saw a kickstarter campaign with thousands of dollars of funding for essentially the same thing I’d abandoned. In //any// case, I really enjoyed these windows into William’s classic texts. They manage to convey a lot of data while still looking typographically appealing, which is something that a lot of word/language-based pieces seem to neglect. I feel an interesting tension when I look at these pieces. On one hand, they’re great (as the creator realized) as large posters; the immense amount of text contributes to visual interest. On the other hand, I wonder if I could learn something a little more meaningful if I weren’t shown //everything//. Making these interactive with more filtering options would enhance them a lot. My biggest lament? : Where is The Tempest?!
Another project with text that is easy on the eye, and curious in concept. I’ve always wondered how the number of silent letters varies from language to language. When learning foreign languages, one feels surprisingly aware of all the ‘stuff’ one is skipping over in pronunciation: french seems to swallow everything, whereas german seems like all sharp stops and well defined vowels. Yet it’s difficult to ascertain whether this is reality or just perception. In my opinion, the most successful iteration of this project is the version where the ‘silent’ letters are moved to the bottom of the page, so one can easily visually compare quantities. One qualm: very few of the silent letters are truly ‘silent’; removing them — even from the title word ‘silenc(e)’ — has a drastic effect on how the word is said. So I guess my question is: what are we really trying to filter for here?
Soccer Stats. Because soccer is awesome, but the data viz is so poor…?
As somebody who tries very hard to coerce all my friends into playing fantasy champions’ league soccer while everybody else in the country plays fantasy NFL, and who therefore is always trying to answer questions like ‘who should I field this week?’ … ‘what’s a holding midfielder?’ … ‘offside?’… and ‘what country is [X] club from?’ I feel like I’m hyper aware of how hard it is to find good visualizations of soccer statistics, rules, and history. Below are two sort-of-nice but sort-of-anemic attempts at saying something about the world’s golden sport. The first actually tackles FIFA’s development work, which has the potential to be a fascinating socio-political resource as well as a sports’ resource, but the content is disappointingly shallow. The second is the interactive map from last year’s Eurocup, which I found charming, if simplistic. It’s also incorrect: Germany should’ve been the last team standing. [cough… hack… cough]
Originally I wanted to do something generative, but then I came across a question I wanted answered, so I decided to do that instead.
Progrmming Style is a somewhat loose term. Having good style helps your code look nice and clean, but honestly good style it subjective. There are many guidelines, and there are many languages. I am curious to find patterns in style across languages and over the course of time.
I plan on using GitHubs API (http://developer.github.com/v3/) to data on popular repositories. I mainly want to grab the individual commits for a specific file in the repos (which can be specified by the user of the Infovis).
I then plan on abstracting the code into a bunch of colored rectangles based on syntax highlighting. The infovis shouldn’t care about the words in the code. Only spatial location of content is important. So imagine converting the code below into a bunch of colored rectangles.
Once I can map code to rectangles, I can show its change in a very abstract way. A new commit can be presented by animating some rectangles. I can emphasize or demphasize the location of comments and definitions. I can even show the negative space to the left side, showing the indentation scheme that was used.
I’m curious to see the evolution of style on different GitHub communities, communities which differ in language used, people, and application. We’ll see how this turns out!
Update:
Here is a very basic visual of mapping keywords to rectangles of a C file on my computer. Darker rectangles represent comments. Hopefully this can help clarify what I mean by blockifying code.
The interesting, and amazing thing about generative music, is that it has a 4th dimension. You can’t just put a screenshot online to describe what it is. And because it involves time, it is in a sense, interactive. Even if it’s not a direct interaction, it has an indirect interaction with time.
Scape – by Brian Eno
Turns out, the very person who coined the term : Generative Music, has a couple of iOS apps for making generative music. One of them is particularly interesting, because I think the way you interact with the app also is unique like the music.
Heart Chamber Orchestra
The Heart Chamber Orchestra – HCO – is a rather different piece of generative music. performance. It’s an orchestra, and it consists of 12 classical musicians. Using their heartbeats, the musicians control a computer composition, and the score is generated in real time by the heartbeats of the musicians. They read and play this score from a computer screen placed in front of them. Custom-made software analyzes the incoming heart-beat data and via different algorithms it generates the real-time musical score for the musicians, the electronic sounds and a CG visualization via 2 projectors in the space.
Quasar – Envis Precisely
Quasar is a midi-visualization app for iphone. However, the visuals, are also computer generated. So it’s partly visualization, partly generative. Makers of the app, did not take the usual route of creating a piece of music first and then find some visualization for it; instead both elements have been developed at the same time.
Brett Victor is awesome! Check out all of his work. The first thing I looked at when I visited his page a while back was this awesome Bio. Something like that one guy who charts pieces of his life, brett uses a simple timeline to show both the quantitative, like where he has lived, and mostly the non-quantitate like his certainty. I think its cool he is able to tell you a story about him using 6 graphs, most of which are hardly scientific.
I really liked most of the visualizations McCandless’s presented in the video. The one I’ll talk about is presented early on. The Billion Dollaro-Gram shows various economic spendings using tightly packed colored rectangles. The proximity and size of rectangles opens the door for users to make a multitude of interesting points. The effect of the financial crisis was actually tangible in comparison to all of the other expensive above it. I found it funny that Walmart revenues in that year were greater than the entire African debt. This reminded me how big our nation really was.
As a whole this work can serve as to explain the effects of global warming. That is not what makes it special. What I like about this work especially is the number of variables of change it conveys without confusing the reader. There is data about time, water height, elevation of cities, An ever changing world map, and information about what caused the sea level change. All of this data is important in understanding each other. I think this article is able to compress this material perfectly with little loss.
The n-body problem involves predicting the motion of celestial objects under mutual gravitation. With many objects, this simulation can be computationally taxing due to n2 force calculations. Here we simulate two hundred massive objects, using the Barnes–Hut algorithm to approximate forces in O(n log n). Using dynamic properties, we can easily encode speed using color, and velocity with a white arrow.
Generative Art Prints
This art prints are all comprised of very simple graphics and simple colors. But it’s very beautiful and I like this simple style.
An intuitive approach to network layout is to model the graph as a physical system: nodes are charged particles that repel each other, and links are dampened springs that pull related nodes together. A physical simulation of these forces then determines node positions; approximation techniques that avoid computing all pairwise forces enable the layout of large numbers of nodes. In addition, interactivity allows the user to direct the layout and jiggle nodes to disambiguate links. Such a force-directed layout is a good starting point for understanding the structure of a general undirected graph. This kinds of graph will be very direct for people to see and to know the relations between each node.
I found this originally with the first looking outwards assignment, as cited by Memo Akten in his fluid simulation. The organic movement of fluid is something that I think would be a huge challenge to recreate digitally and always with beautiful results.
Procedural terrain generation usually uses Perlin noise to create a 2D terrain with varied height, where the noise controls the y-value of the horizon line as it is generated. The midpoint displacement algorithm is also sometimes used, and involves splitting the horizon line into halves and offsetting the ‘halfway’ points by raising them or dropping them by a random height. According to this paper, a major problem with procedural generation is the creation of overhangs or caves. While some games like minecraft appear to have overcome this obstacle, it has not been overcome in a general sense.
Equilibrioception –
Equilibrioception is the sense of balance that almost all organisms possess. I couldn’t find any scientific papers on mimicking the phenomenon in artificial life outside of robotics. Maybe that’s because it’s trivial in cyberspace but I think it would be interesting to have AI with a non-trivial sense of balance. Regardless, here’s a link to my favorite robotics video of all time.
Mitosis and Cytokinesis
The process in which cells divide, thereby producing more cells. “Mitosis is the process by which a eukaryotic cell separates the chromosomes in its cell nucleus into two identical sets, in two separate nuclei. It is a form of karyokinesis, or nuclear division. It is generally followed immediately by cytokinesis, which divides the nuclei, cytoplasm, organelles, and cell membrane into two cells containing roughly equal shares of these cellular components.[1] Mitosis and cytokinesis together define the mitotic (M) phase of the cell cycle—the division of the mother cell into two daughter cells, genetically identical to each other and to their parent cell.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitosis
This is a data visualization, but it plays on cell division. I just really like this one :3
Neural networks
I’ve always had an interest in nerves, the nervous system, and neural networks in general. “A biological neural network is composed of a group or groups of chemically connected or functionally associated neurons. A single neuron may be connected to many other neurons and the total number of neurons and connections in a network may be extensive. Connections, called synapses, are usually formed from axons to dendrites, though dendrodendritic microcircuits[2] and other connections are possible. Apart from the electrical signaling, there are other forms of signaling that arise from neurotransmitter diffusion.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network
Below are some pretty cool visualizations. The lower one was done in Processing.
Heliotropism
When a plant moves its flowers and/or leaves to face the sun. Not to be mistaken with Phototropism (or directional growth, in which the plant grows toward the sun). Heliotropic flowers track the sun’s motion across the sky from east to west. During the night, the flowers may assume a random orientation, while at dawn they turn again toward the east where the sun rises. The motion is performed by motor cells in a flexible segment just below the flower, called a pulvinus. The motor cells are specialized in pumping potassium ions into nearby tissues, changing their turgor pressure. The segment flexes because the motor cells at the shadow side elongate due to a turgor rise. Heliotropism is a response to blue light.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliotropism
Arctic poppies!
Some generative art
While browsing the internet for heliotropism and generative art I found this little piece called Silk.
Tension, morph and twist under physical constraints of stripped-down architectural forms in a tug-of-war.
I like how the buildings become “alive” when a kinetic force is applied through a network of nodes. This phenomenon in physics seems to create dramatic effects when a (virtual) force influences seemingly ordered constructs. I think the the setup of the piece and the placement of the camera displays the chain of action and reaction of the force on the constructs very well.
A fractal growth model to simulate organic natural forms through mathematical rules.
Through “diffusion limited aggregation”, Andy Lomas was inspired by the fractal growth model to create these amazing generative art pieces. I really like how it resembles the corals of the oceans. The black and white rendering creates an ambient of an living organism. I’m very curious about how a simple mathematical rule is able to generate such a complex shape and form. This might be something to look into for my assignment.
I really like this experimental film which simulates and creates synthetic spaces and “alien” abstract worlds. Especially, how the environments are constantly changing due to the rendering choices rather than having a smooth render. The camera motion and music complements the spatial design of these abstract worlds in a way in which it creates frightening depths and emptiness.
There’s another wonderful piece from FIELD which simulates the transformation of inspiration into an ocean of color.
