Aaron Koblin on the Digital Renaissance

We’re big fans of creative technology rock star Aaron Koblin, whose Sheep Market, Bicycle Built for 2,000 and Johnny Cash projects we’ve featured previously.

In this excellent interview, the fine folks of Emergence Collective track Aaron down at Sundance, where he’s working on Google’s Life in a Day crowdsourced film project, and ask him some compelling questions about computational aesthetics, the digital renaissance, and the future of creative technology:

• Are there networked aesthetics which can be visually identified?
• How will moving images change in the next 20–30 years?
• What do you think about this word ‘user-generated content’?
• Do you identify with the current artistic trend to shift away from product towards process?
• What indicators are there of a digital renaissance?

We’re seeing what happens when you reach a point where computational resources are no longer the most significant factor in thinking, where we don’t have to bend our will to what we’re able to do. We’re really able to stop thinking about [computational resources] and bend them to our needs and our interests. It lends itself to a complete different type of a creative process, where you can really explore and experiment a lot more freely than one could before. […] Perhaps most significantly, it lets us create our own limitations, and I think those generally can be a lot more meaningful than the ones arbitrarily put on by the media.” ~ Aaron Koblin

You can find Aaron’s work in a couple of our favorite books on the convergence of computational software and creativity, FORM+CODE and Data Flow 2: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design.

HT @edwardharran

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Journalism in the Age of Data: A Film

What bad writing has to do with war casualties and traffic over North America.

It’s no secret we have a data visualization fetish, but that’s not just because we like looking at pretty pictures; it’s because we believe the discipline is an important sensemaking mechanism for today’s data deluge, a new kind of journalism that helps frame the world and what matters in it in a visual, compelling, digestible way. Stanford’s Geoff McGhee, an online journalist specializing in multimedia and information design, tends to agree. His excellent Journalism in the Age of Data explores data visualization as a storytelling medium in an hour-long film highlighting some of the most important concepts, artists and projects in data visualization from the past few years.

Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?”

The film features many Brain Pickings favorites you may recognize: Aaron Koblin, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, and many more.

I think we’re still in the early stage. I think a lot of the artists and journalists are still very much exploring what the capabilities of data visualization are for communicating both the context and the narrative elements of a story.” ~ Jeffrey Heer, Stanford University

One of the most noteworthy aspects of the film is the distinction it draws between data visualization as smart storytelling and data visualization as an aimless aesthetic playground.

I think that ‘data visualization’ is becoming a phrase that doesn’t mean as much as it should do. All it means is looking at numbers, which is what a lot of information graphics are, as far as I’m concerned. Now, it seems, ‘data visualization’ means visualizing a whole lot of data. And that’s given rise to a trend that I think is damaging. Because you can do beautiful things with computers and lots of data that look very, very nice and are almost completely incomprehensible.” ~ Nigel Holmes, Information Graphics Designer

I think there very much is a craft in this field. And if you do it wrong, you can get very bad results, just as there’s a lot of badly written stories out there.” ~ Martin Wattenberg, IBM Research

If you enjoyed McGhee’s film, you’ll most certainly love the ambitious anthology Data Flow 2 — we highly recommend it. Another interesting companion is this Nieman Lab piece on how The Guardian is pioneering data journalism with free tools.

via Infographics News

UPDATE: The Guardian has just published an excellent guide to how to be a data journalist.

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Data Flow, The Sequel

What seven years of eye candy have to do with the future of design in the age of data.

We love data visualization in all its forms. A few months ago, we reviewed The Visual Miscellaneum, a wonderful anthology of the most potent eye candy in one domain of data viz, infographics. Today, we’re taking a look at Data Flow 2: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design — the brilliant sequel to our favorite book on the most compelling work in all of data visualization as a broad and cross-disciplinary creative medium, from static infographics to dynamic interactive visualizations to physical data sculptures and beyond.

The book is equal parts visual indulgence and conceptual intelligence, with artwork from and interviews of the leading creators in this field of increasing cultural relevance, as information continues to proliferate and overwhelm.

Included in this tome are numerous projects we’ve featured here over the past couple of years, including Toby Ng’s The World of 100, Coriette Schoenaerts’ clothing maps of Europe, and various visualization of information inspired by the London tube map.

With contributions for Brain Pickings favorites like Manuel Lima and Aaron Koblin, the book offers a unique look at this thriving intersection of design and technology.

[This book] is extremely well done — a beautiful overview of some of the most important infographics of the last several years.” ~ Aaron Koblin

Spanning the entire spectrum of practical advice, technical insight and aesthetic inspiration, Data Flow 2 is positively the most exciting book in creative visualization this year.

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The Johnny Cash Project: Global Collaborative Storytelling

Frames, doodles, and how to weave a digital quilt out of legendary music and cultural history.

Our friend Aaron Koblin — he of Sheep Market and Bicycle Built for 2,000 fame — is back with a brilliant new project in collaboration with director Chris Milk for Lost Highway records: The Johnny Cash Project, a global collaborative art project constructing a music video for Cash’s final studio recording, “Ain’t No Grave,” from hundreds of user-submitted one-of-a-kind portraits of the iconic artist.

The drawings are crowdsourced using an online tool similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which randomly selects three frames for the contributor to choose from and draw.

The Johnny Cash Project is a visual testament to how the Man in Black lives on — not just through his vast musical legacy, but in the hearts and minds of all of us around the world he has touched with his talent, his passion, and his indomitable spirit.

You can algorithmically curate various versions of the video by toggling between different criteria by which to sort the individual frames — highest-rated, most recent, most intricate, realistic, abstract, and more.

Needless to say, we love both the concept and the execution — not only because it offers an intriguing contrast between this digital playground and what we’ve always found to be the rustic, analog appeal of Cash’s sound, but also because it crafts a beautiful metaphor for the breadth and impact of his music, revealing both the uniquely intimate experience of each listener and the powerful global cultural resonance of his heritage.

Contribute your thread to this wonderful collaboratively woven magic.

via Creativity

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