Text2Image

This week, I stumbled upon a new text visualization: Text2Image, by Ted Davis. The concept is not at all new, basically put, it takes an array of characters and after processing, creates a sequence of colored blocks. Very poetic, very colorful, but also very mysterious. Although it seems to generate consistent results, there is no clue whatsoever as to how they are constructed, why different colors are chosen and why some letters generate longer strings of blocks.
Very interesting to play with, though!

Del.iciou.us

"I Lego NY"

Last week, January 30th, Hans Beck, creator of Playmobil left this world after a long serious illness. Even though Lego and Playmobil are competitors, the idea is basically the same. After I read the news about Beck's tragic death (sadly, I was out for the holiday so I did not read about it until this morning), I couldn't help but recollect Christoph Niemann's I Lego N.Y., published last Monday, Feb. 2^nd, on NY Times' Abstract City. It's simple, it's direct, it's delightful! Gotta love meaningful minimalism.



All images from original post

Check the rest of the photos here.

Del.iciou.us

Backwards visualization (as an art form)

Wikipedia defines visualization as "any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message". Usually, it's main goal is to make information clearer in a broad view. Though, Chris Jordan - known photographer - uses the concept backwards to prove a point, as a form of art.
Chris' work depicts the usual America (meaning U.S.) mentality, which seems to grieve for some disasters (Chris mentioned 9/11th as an example in his talk on TED back in June), but misses actual daily massive disasters (he also mentioned the 1100 deaths due to nicotine usage daily as an example).
He takes random expressive statistics about common habits simulates the usual view of the population on it by showing massive numbers of objects mashed together to form an image. When the viewer drills down to the picture detail, the actual object, subject of the piece, shows itself.
His main pieces can be found on his website (Chris Jordan Photographic Arts). The most impressive to me are the Oil Barrels, which shows 28.000 42-gallon barrels, the amount of oiled consumed in the U.S. every minute, Plastic Cups, portraying 1 million plastic cups - the amount of cups used on airline flights in 6 hours everyday in the U.S. (none of which are reused or recycled in any way) -, and the Cell Phones, which consists of 426.000 cell phones - the number of cell phones retired in the U.S. everyday.

You can enjoy Chris' talk on TED.

Del.iciou.us