DigitalCuppa

I like this spot from ASICS. It’s intriguing to look at, innovative and actually has a solid link to the product, with the strapline, “Gravity, Meet Your Archenemy”.

For me, this is the type of art I like. I will stare blankly at a Monet or Dali for all of moments before moving on, but I find more to explore in something manufactured, engineered or digitally rendered. I first started taking an interest in this area when I visited Decode at the V&A last year, where one piece in particular caught my eye. This was named Flight Patterns, by Aaron Koblin. In this, Koblin maps out the flight patterns across the US over the course of a day (video here, see his website for stills) and so great are the numbers of planes, the outline of the US and the routes in and out of it are clearly visible.

Neil Perkin (if you ever have the chance to see him speak, do so!) blogged about an awesome project from photographer Eric Fischer a while back, who utilised geo-tagged images on Picasa and flickr to build up images of cities, with the density indicating areas where the most photos originated from (slideshow after the break).

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I was at the Guardian Media Summit a few weeks ago and a couple of interesting examples were highlighted there too, including a piece called Immaterials, that visualises WiFi signals in urban areas (video below). Dennis Crowley from foursquare presented too, and used this image - a map of the world visualised only using check-ins.

Art is about personal connection and meaning, so having grown up in the digital age I think it’s fair to argue that for many like me, pieces like these will have more obvious meaning behind them than what many would consider as traditional art. They may not intricately capture an artist’s suffering or a great historical event, but it is insight and in this age of data, visualisations like this will more often than not help us understand the world in which we live right now.

EDIT: I’ve realised the title for this post now has relatively little to do with the content – off on a huge tangent there! Just felt like sharing.