Occupy Scales of Wealth: Income Inequality Visualized as NYC Map

From Red Hook to Prince Edward Island by way of the 99 percent.

Since 2004, literary and cultural magazine n+1 has been a flare of hope for intelligent print media. This fall, they embarked upon an effort to capture the dimensionality of the Occupy movement with equal parts awe and analysis (with a dash of healthy skepticism) in an Occupy!, an “OWS-inspired” print gazette, the third and final issue of which dropped last week. Gracing its cover is a wildly intelligent graphic by my wildly talented friend Kelli Anderson, visualizing wealth inequality in America through an unexpected, revealing lens that examines OWS as a physical occupation that unfolded in physical space.

The graphic is inspired by the familiar scales of the universe maps, plotting the relative distances between planetary bodies onto a local map that encourages an embodied understanding of celestial distances by walking local routes. Kelli transposed income inequalities using Wall Street Journal data onto the geography of New York City itself. Zuccotti Park, the center of the map, represents the income of the average wage-earner. Other percentiles’ average incomes — of the top 1%, the top 10%, the top 50% — appear longitudinally from there, with the bottom-earners (the bottom 0.01%) falling somewhere around Red Hook Battlefields and the highest earners (the top 0.01%) bleeding off the map, almost into the Arctic Circle, in Canada’s Prince Edward Island. Walking from Zuccotti park, or the average person’s income, to the bottom of the income scale will cost you a couple of hours, and trekking to the very top of the scale would take more than 18 days of continuous walking — a powerful manifestation of just how imbalanced and skewed our wealth scale is.

Kelli observes in an email:

The scale of the solar system (which is reigned-in by the gravity of the sun) is far less dispersed than the the scales of wealth in the US—which illuminates the propensity for wealth to skew wildly to the top when the financial system is not effectively regulated. Note that almost everyone in the top 1% works in banking or finance.

Also note that the income discrepancy within the levels of the top 1% are vastly greater than the gap between the top 1% and the bottom 1% of income earners. The proportions of wealth in the upper echelons of income are of a scale to which we have no comparable metaphors— the proportions are far beyond what we can see in the physical reality of our solar system.”

All three parts of the Occupy! gazette are available as free PDF downloads. Also highly recommended: n+1′s Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America — a fantastic collection of essays, featuring Astra Taylor, Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, Rebecca Solnit, and other cerebral acrobats well worth your time and dime.

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What is Generative Art? A 7-Minute PBS Micro-Documentary

The rhetoric of data, or how to reconcile human and algorithm in the age of collective intelligence.

After their fantastic 7-minute documentary on typography, the fine folks at PBS Off Book are back with another micro-documentary, this time spotlighting generative art and featuring creators like generative composer Luke Dubois, game designer Will Wright, and software artist Scott Draves, who discuss everything from new narratives in visual storytelling to negotiating the relationship between humans and algorithms to the rhetoric of data.

This century is the century of data, that’s the defining thing. Last century was the century of electricity.” ~ Luke Dubois

For more on this ever-fascinating and increasingly relevant subject, don’t miss this omnibus of 7 essential books on data visualization and generative art.

In 2011, bringing you Brain Pickings took more than 5,000 hours. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider a modest donation.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

A Mosaic Time-Lapse Visualization of the Sky for an Entire Year

Syncing the celeste, or how to touch the fabric of time.

Since ancient times, the sky has been an object of fixation for humanity. Just recently, we’ve explored some delightful DIY guides to cloudwatching and stargazing, but artist Ken Murphy has taken it to another level. For the past 365 days, he’s pointed his lens to the sky, using a custom camera rig affixed atop the Exploratorium museum on the edge of San Francisco Bay, and captured an image every 10 seconds. The result is A History of the Sky — a mesmerizing mosaic of time-lapse movies, each containing a 24-hour period, synced and arranged chronologically in a (slightly more mathematically convenient than the 365-day calendar) grid of 360 total rectangles.

(Full-screen is your friend here.)

Time-lapse movies are compelling because they give us a glimpse of events that are continually occurring around us, but at a rate normally far too slow to for us to observe directly. A History of the Sky enables the viewer to appreciate the rhythms of weather, the lengthening and shortening of days, and other atmospheric events on an immediate aesthetic level: the clouds, fog, wind, and rain form a rich visual texture, and sunrises and sunsets cascade across the screen.” ~ Ken Murphy

The project is a living piece — the camera continues to collect images and integrate them with the mosaic daily, resulting in a different visualization every day reflective of the most recent 360 days.

For more astounding art based on the weather, don’t forget TED Fellow Nathalie Miebach’s striking musical weather data sculptures.

via The Creators Project

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