Data Visualisation, algorithmic art, generative art, computer generated imagery
My first data visualisation project. This is actually my graduation project for my computer science
degree. I refused to hand in another savy business problem solving solution so Instead I chose to
graduate on the thesis: abstract form datavisualisation from arbitrary data sources can bring insights
to the problem domain that could be unexpected, fresh or new.
I used to illustrate this with the following two cases. In my, young man's perception of the political
structures in the United states there were only two political parties, the Republican and the
Democratic. But when I fed US based political parties campaign data into my machine to visualise that
data in an abstract form it turned out that you could see multiple clusters of data based on shape and
color and after examining the data it turned out that there are multiple political parties in the United
States.
It turns out that non-specific analysis of data can bring you new information. That same argument could
be used for analysing for instance of DNA information. Usually you will comb through this data searching
for relations and features. If you approach this data however from a different angle, try to create
abstract estethic visualisations it could help finding relations and features that are important but
were not defined in the initial analysis and could therefore be overlooked.
After my initial implementation I rebuild the same program a couple of times, each time with new insights
like color manipulation, shape definitions and opening it up to various types of arbitrary data souces,
xml, json, twitter feeds etc.
At it's peak she was taking trending topic data from twitter and after processing and visualising she
posted the result back into the trending topic feed, creating a feedback loop and at the same time
annoying many twitter users with maybe one of the early twitter bots.
The project's significance for me has been overtaken by a host of talented new artists out there who with
a bit of help of the NFT hype have been creating awesome and way more interesting pieces then I ever
could. Check them out.
