source code is downloadable and running on a local computer would be much more reliable than running this on an applet. I am not sure but it is just not loading from google on a web browser…

I haven’t touch to video part yet as I have another project to finish in one week. (Nature of Code). I can continue this exercise over the summer. It can be a good one thinking I haven’t touch any pixel reading or displaying concept in Java. (Liebermann’s workshop is still waiting for me).

Overall I can say that this class and Daniel Shiffman’s instructing was much of a help for me developing my coding skills throughout the semester, I feel myself lucky taking a class from him.

Text Wire 2 is one example among those. This is a good exercise to do if I want to combine my nature of code and programming from a to z skills. I am trying to find a way to display in my application so those examples are really handy.

Also this is a total different example of using ASCII art in a java applet.

I am still researching text based projects over the net. I have come up with a guy named Peter Cho and it looks like he did incredible projects with text. I want to list ones I liked the most:
Letterscapes is a comment on letters. Very perfectly solved isometric angle fits great with the animations.
I am really curious about his thesis, and expressive dimensional typography overall. I am hoping to read it when I find sometime (hopefully after show).
Actually I have found out he did a similar project called Money Plus, while he is in UCLA, he is sending queries to google and searching words that are coming from users plus money. He is displaying them on a screen.

quote:”-data is everywhere. information?”

scenario 1: user just goes in the room, he sees the screen full of data from various web sources that look meaningless to him. Once he is in the range of the sensing camera, he sees himself inside the screen as a silhouette covered with these information flow. According to his moves, the data becomes something more “meaningful” for him. I am looking for ways to get certain inputs from the user and/or how to create this “meaningful” information.

scenario 2: the information on the screen is related to physical character of the user. The sensing mechanism calculates height, the shape of the body, the colours of the user’s clothes, brands and spits information according to this. advertising? Is this really what user wants? What would be our reaction to a strange machine inspecting us and our privacy, while everyday we are being inspected with eyes of everyone that surrounded us.

scenario 3: the information sources could be constrained. classified(bloody news, happy news). certain mappings. Red shirt you wear brings wikipedia entry about red shirt etc. getting cues from the audience and spit information according to that. What kind of information, historical, geographical, biological, horoscope?

idea : we are surrounded with lots of data that is meaningless to us. Is there a way to make this data more meaningful for us? Do we want this data to be more meaningful? What kind of data is more attracting to us than others? Is there anyway to reveal certain patterns in user behaviors that gives cues about information they are looking for? Could these patterns improve the quality of the information sources over time?

This was last week, I still feel something is missing in my project that I’d would like to make users aware. Here is the steps that I am going to take in this project:
1 – Get screenshot of users image through a camera. Try to get cues related to user. Colors of what he/she wears, his/her height are the ones that look more appropriate as I am stressing not to get this information through his/her intentions. Why? By getting this information without his notice, I am suggesting the information is already there whether we want it to be there or not. But still this gives me so little and abstract information unfortunately.

2 – Get the average color value of the image. Go to flickr and mine random images that have similar average color values. Get their tags and display on the screen. This is a little bit tricky and is still not the final thought. What I am trying to question is, could be the information related to the owner with only getting so little data, data that is put out of his/her intentions. The problem I will likely come across is that I am afraid the users are not able to connect what they see on the screen with themselves and the work will be left conceptually. So I need a strong element that connects those two. I might escape this in processing with adding something that is following this users’ path.

3 – Starting random images in flickr doesn’t seem to be a good idea to me at this point. At least there has to be some connection, why flickr, why starting with random a as opposed to random b? Those questions are still waiting to be answered. Also I have come up with this project called Open Mind Commonsense. The page seems to be down, but there is an article in KurweizAI.net by Push Singh. This is really parallel what I am trying to achieve. I am after text, images etc which is already there related to us. check out this first paragraph from the article:

Why is it that our computers have no grasp of ordinary life? Wouldn’t it be great if your search engine knew enough about life so that it could conclude that when you typed in “a gift for my brother”, it knew that because he had just moved into his first apartment that he could probably use some new furniture? Or if your cell phone knew enough about emergencies that, even though you had silenced it in the movie theater, it could know to ring if your mother were to call from the hospital? Or if your personal digital assistant knew enough about people that it could know to cancel a hiking trip with a friend who had just broken a leg?

4- Wouldn’t it be great if we can search the text by its affective emotions and color code the text according to that?

Technically I started with baby steps and right now I can get average RGB – HSB values of an image without any problems. Here is my code:

[code]
PImage b;
void setup() {
b = loadImage("deneme.jpg");
int rsum = 0;
int gsum = 0;
int bsum = 0;

for (int i = 0; i color redk = (color) ((b.pixels[i] & 0xFF0000) >> 16);
// println("redk: " + redk);
color greenk = (color) ((b.pixels[i] & 0x00FF00) >> 8);
// println("greenk: " + greenk);
color bluek = (color) ( b.pixels[i] & 0x0000FF);
// println("bluek: " + bluek);

rsum += redk;
gsum += greenk;
bsum += bluek;
}
println(rsum/b.pixels.length);
println(gsum/b.pixels.length);
println(bsum/b.pixels.length);
float[] hsb = Color.RGBtoHSB(rsum, gsum, bsum, null);

// println(hsb[0]);
size(200,150);
image(b,0,0);
}
[/code]

So for my next step, I should figure out how to mine images in flickr and get their tags according to those images. I should still think how I can reveal sensible information and connect those with the users.

Nowhere is a landscape in the condition of development. the users of the german search-engine METAGER erode rivers, canyons and valleys by their search-movements. search-requests, existing only for a fraction of a second on the internet, get inscribed in a block of pu-foarm (75cm x 75cm x 10cm) by a 3d milling-machine. the continuous stream of queries defines the rhythm of the machine.

Another example could be Email Erosion.

Email Erosion automatically creates sculptures out of biodegradable, starch-based foam using spam and email as stimuli. Based on email, the Eroder may elect to rotate the foam, raise or lower the Sprayer or erode the foam with a spray of water.

What I like about those pieces are mainly their ability to create something totally different from the actual source, transform this data more than mapping the data itself to a concrete material at least.

According to the Lev Manovich’s paper [Data Visualisation as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime, 2002 .doc format] one of the earliest mapping project which revived lots of attention was Natalie Jeremijenko’s “live wire”.

The movement of the dangling wire is proportional to the number of packets on the network. That is, the more traffic on the local area network, the higher the frequency of the “wiggles.” The transceiver plugs into the network, and the dynamic behavior of the wire become an intuitive peripheral representation of the network activity. In contrast to a screen based graph of ethernet activity this device is a shared social display of information.

In his paper, Malovich points out that data visualization arts should be carrying certain reasons in their work. One of them is arbitrary versus motivated choices in mapping. He questions the artist’s mapping selection since the computers allow us to easily map any data set into another set. He suggests to foreground the arbitrary nature of the chosen mapping as one way to deal with this problem. Another question he stresses is the conceptual elegance and poetry that is lacking in the works. He gives the modern art as the example showing us the ambiguity always present in our perception and experiencee, to show us what we normally don’t notice or don’t pay attention to. He expects same kind of approach in visualizations.

The more interesting and at the end maybe more important challenge is how to represent the personal subjective experience of a person living in a data society. If daily interaction with volumes of data and numerous messages is part of our new “data-subjectivity,” how can we represent this experience in new ways? How new media can represent the ambiguity, the otherness, the multi-dimensionality of our experience, going beyond already familiar and “normalized” modernist techniques of montage, surrealism, absurd, etc.? In short, rather than trying hard to pursue the anti-sublime ideal, data visualization artists should also not forget that art has the unique license to portray human subjectivity – including its fundamental new dimension of being “immersed in data.”

Funny when I was searching for live wire project in google, I have come up with Sculpting with Data class that Tom Igoe taught in Spring 2003. I am kind of surprised that class is not being offered last year or this year.

Well it has been a funny week, I was playing with delicious API and trying to parse the data I got into some kind of visualization. There was some problem displaying text on eclipse though, so I ported whole project into processing and continue there. Here is the link to my midterm project overall. It still needs to be improved and I believe I am going to extend it in the following days.

I think the article itself is important as how it tells data-representation-visualization as not merely simple representation but also revealing the details that is hiding inside of the data and how we/as users/ all interested could be a great clue of how data visualization is important in our lives. We can see a similar approach at the Seattle Public Library where 6 LCD screens on glass wall were built to show the visualization of data circulation of the library items. Making visible the invisible.

For Noah Wardrip-Fruin and which I totally agree, the main difference of these projects that draws the line between them and a simple visualization is their outcome spits an idea rather than flying numbers or texts.

Problem with such an agent is I am-just-not-ready-to-give-control-to-it. Rephrasing, I have to trust it with my whole heart that it is going to do the vital selections for me. I think the biggest problem lies in here. So to avoid such a problem, we must pull back our dependencies to a level where it is balanced between our trust and its selection. It is an interesting subject b/c my approach subscribing to shitload of channels becoming obsolete with that kind of approach isn’t it? Well I dunno. I guess I should build such an agent and test it…

I came to this work through a fascination with possibilites of words, and with the sense that undifferentiated flow down a page wasn’t the right medium for the text I wanted to write.

the time of reading and the time of the processes overlap. there’s text and then there are processes, and the processes enact something in connection with the actions of the reader, at the time of reading, that is related to the themes of the text but not the same. text that responds on a textual level, to things that thappen at the time of reading, such as actions on the part of the reader.

That makes me think about the form as transformation of concepts. The work should be transparent and give feedback to audience in a shape that audience could think something out of it.

Also lately I came across different sites [one was datablogging and the other was seattle library visualization which uses the books that have been taken as the elements and projecting this on the wall of the library] that rely mostly on data and It was dichitung I guess where I read when visualization is art when it is not. Actually question of being an art piece or not is not my biggest concern, but finding new ways of approach to visualization, taking the data and transforming it in a sense that you give something to your audience, a message…

Camille Utterback’s work textrain is also another use of text which is different from what we are used to. It is as Wardrip-Fruin’s words; a shift from text representing a story to text representing an idea.

He has a good article back in dichtung’s previous issue : Here.

well said.

Here is the equation of it :

More to follow about this subject.