The influence of data system mapping is immediately apparent when first confronted with the drawings of Emma McNally. The complexity of lines could represent online chatter, the flight path of starlings, or a new global epidemic. But they are all pencil on paper and any system that is being plotted here exists purely within McNally’s mind.

“When Dan [Stowell] started tweeting snippets of SuperCollider code he expected a lot of “throwaway waffle” but collated also a bunch of really interesting things…Many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you re-run the source code (the track titles) you get a new piece of music.”
—Susanna Glaser at The Mire writing about the live coding music project Supercollider140, 22 pieces by artists from around the world, each piece created with just 140 characters of code.

Trailer for a new BBC series that uses satellite tracking and computer imaging to map the “unseen ballet of Britain”.

“Among modern artists I conceptually identify with Jackson Pollock – not that I’m a particular fan of his visual style, but because he always identified himself as a painter, even though a lot of the time his brush never hit the canvas. There’s something in that disconnect – not using a brush or tool in traditional methods.”
and
“Pollock might argue that it’s the process of abstraction that’s dynamic, not the end result, which in his case is a static painting. In my own work, the end result is never static; …

Searching for examples of info graphics from the New York Times, I found this great collection of work by Megan Jaegerman (on Tufte’s site no less). Also worth checking out: Matthew Ericson, the Deputy Graphics Director at the NY Times, recently gave the keynote at an info graphics conference in California. You can download the slides (pdf) for this presentation titled “Visualizing Data for the Masses: Information Graphics at The New York Times”. (all of this via: db79.com)

“The water footprint of a person, company or nation is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the commodities, goods and services consumed by the person, company or nation.”
Designer Timm Kekeritz creates something tangible (and beautiful) through his poster design for The Virtual Water Project.

From Visual Complexity:
“Using information design principles and graphical techniques, the 85+ recorded covers of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is mapped in relation to the original recordings by the band.”
The requisite soundtrack…
…and the trailer for Anton Corbijn’s Control.

“My intention is to create work that asks questions about the implications of urban sprawl and its impact on the environment. I am interested in creating psychological narratives set in closed systems that express the behavior of and the interaction between humans and animals. The dystopian model creates a dynamic playing field where I can experiment with these ideas and forms.”
The stunning, isometrically-inclined work of Josh Keyes.

Chris Jordan’s photographic essays seem to always be preoccupied with uncovering beauty in the spoils of our society. Discarded circuit boards take on a patchwork air, while a rack of waterlogged dresses hints at a rainbow in the otherwise twisted wake of a post-Katrina New Orleans. In his series Running the Numbers, he uses statistics as his subject, producing compelling large scale photographic collages that serve as visual representations of societal numbers that are often too collosally abstract to even try to comprehend.
As Jordan states: “I am appalled by these …

As a followup to yesterday’s entry:
“Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans.”
Matt WoolmanDigital Information Graphics