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posted by DensityDesign
Sunday, June 10th, 2007

InfoVis.net


How to build a Graph, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

InfoVis.net is a project devoted to Information Visualisation, seen as the process of incorporation of knowledge through the perception of information, mainly (but not only) in visual form.
Sometimes it is confused with Information Design. Info Design is part of InfoVis.

In order to contribute to the definition of this emerging specialty.
To build a technical and social reference of the same.
To build, in a collaborative way, a “State of the Art” around InfoVis .

(Give a look)

posted by Donato Ricci
Sunday, June 10th, 2007

Win if you can!


chess game, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer’s thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.
(play)

posted by DensityDesign
Sunday, June 10th, 2007

27


27, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

Jonathan Harris is an artist and storyteller working primarily on the Internet. His work involves the exploration and understanding of humans, on a global scale, through the artifacts they leave behind on the Web.
(explore its work)

posted by DensityDesign
Sunday, June 10th, 2007

visual olimpics


http://www.elmundo.es/jjoo/2004/html/graficos/, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

For the olimpic games El Mundo has made a very intresting explanation of how sports work by using animated graphics.
you can see rules, dynamics, tricks..

(give a look)

posted by DensityDesign
Sunday, June 10th, 2007

Areva


Areva, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

a nice example of how the isometric representation can be use in the communication of the elements of a system…

(see the video)

(see also the parody against the nuclear)

posted by Donato Ricci
Sunday, June 10th, 2007

A thousand plateaus


A thousand plateaus, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. … It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills“.

Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction, neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite. In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system with a General and without an organizing memory or central automation, defined solely by a circulation of states“.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, CIG, 2004.

posted by DensityDesign
Sunday, June 10th, 2007

Levitated.net


Levitated.net, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

Levitated.net contains visual poetry and science fun narrated in an object oriented graphic environment.
This website is an inspirational tour of what is mathematically & programmatically possible with flash and actionscript. The designs are based on natural algorithms, and the code is simple and elegant.

posted by DensityDesign
Sunday, June 10th, 2007

Processing


processing, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

Processing is an open project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas (UCLA Design | Media Arts). Processing evolved from ideas explored in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab.

posted by Donato Ricci
Sunday, June 10th, 2007

Complots


M. Lombardi, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

A few weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an FBI agent called the Whitney Museum of American Art and asked to see a drawing on exhibit there. The piece was by Mark Lombardi, an artist who had committed suicide the year before. Using just a pencil and a huge sheet of paper, Lombardi had created an intricate pattern of curves and arcs to illustrate the links between global finance and international terrorism.
Ever since the United States invaded Iraq in what seemed to many a puzzlingly indirect reaction to Al Qaeda’s 9/11 terrorist attacks, questions about the Bush administration’s real motivations have been a matter of debate and speculation. Was the purpose really to spread freedom and democracy, or were there other unacknowledged plans? Many people who knew Lombardi and his work have wished he were still around to connect the dots.

Mark Lombardi (1951-2000) draws on the major political and financial scandals of the day to create large-scale linear diagrams that at first glance look like celestial maps; a closer reading reveals the intricate web of connections that lurk beneath current headlines. From Whitewater to the Vatican Bank, Lombardi uses dotted lines and broken arrows to chart the paths of illicit deals and laundered money, keeping track of it all in a handwritten database of 12,000 index cards. By scrutinizing the mutable boundaries that separate artistic practice from daily life, Lombardi wrings visual poetry out of dirty secrets–the results are a chillingly beautiful guide to the facts of life.

Discovering the shadowy interconnectedness of what you would have thought were totally unrelated people and agencies can induce paranoia, but it is also curiously satisfying; the world starts to make a kind of cosmic sense. Lombardi’s works are near-perfect weddings of aesthetic form and worldly content.

The drawings leave out a lot of information, and they raise as many questions as they answer. Their broad, untouched areas of white paper are metaphorical as well as literal: You have to fill in the blanks for yourself. So the viewer is thrown into a philosophical quandary: Is the truth out there, a discoverable empirical order? Or do we project the truth by means of our own stories and fantasies and according to our aesthetic predilections onto an otherwise chaotic reality?

After 9/11, that philosophical quandary took on a more than theoretical urgency. Lombardi did not predict the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or the US invasion of Iraq, though you get the feeling that had he lived he would not have been surprised by either. What he left for the future was an exemplary method for making sense of the bewildering and scary new world so tragically ushered in by the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
(text source)

posted by DensityDesign
Sunday, June 10th, 2007

Luigi Ghirri's Maps and photos

Talking about maps and their use as a visual language, we can point out the Luigi Ghirri’s work.

Atlante
è la storia di un viaggio che si snoda lungo i percorsi della mente umana, per giungere all’approdo sicuro della memoria e del ricordo. E’ il lungo viaggio che Luigi Ghirri (Scandiano 1943 – Roncocesi 1992) intraprende nel 1973 quando inizia a fotografare, quasi si trattasse di paesaggi, le immagini di carte geografiche e astronomiche del suo atlante. Piccoli dettagli, porzioni di un paesaggio descritto solamente con le parole tecniche e scientifiche della toponomastica o della cartografia stradale, trascendono verso una nuova dimensione, diventando pretesto per il racconto di un viaggio che ciascuno può intraprendere attraverso i meandri dei propri desideri. Con le parole di geografia immaginaria, è lo stesso Ghirri a indicarci il reale significato di quelle immagini poetiche che non sono semplicemente destinate a esaurirsi nella loro stessa evidenza tautologica. (Chiara Bertola, Label Autumn 2004)