Health and Other Obsessions

Being a bit of a health nerd I have come across numerous Health info vis in the past. Some of these are quite literally food for thought (sorry, couldn't resist the punderful joke). Mashable has brilliant examples of info Vis also. They have an interesting link here: http://mashable.com/2010/03/19/amazing-health-infographics/ At the end of the day it is hard to advise people on their Health as too much of anything is bad for you and people differ, however using scientific evidence as a good way to get around this:

Some of the not so effective supplements here are rather surprising. I think this is where Info Vis outdoes normal textual Data, at a glance you can see that vitamin A and vitamin E, though popular are surprisingly unbeneficial. The original pice is way more interesting as it is interactive, check it out here. It is also done using Flash, something I am considering using for my assignment.

As I mentioned at the start I'm a bit of a health nerd, I'm also an economics nerd. Another interesting Info Vis I came across was American shame. This is a fascinating piece for many reasons, one it shows that the if we leave the banks go line we've been fed isn't as black as certain parties have been making it out to be, Iceland did just that and currently rank higher than us in this, based on IMF data. Although represented in a fairly traditional manner, the colour holds signifigance here. It's called American Shame as America performs so poorly, this should also finally put the Boston V Berlin debate firmly to rest, look at Germany and look at USA, it's clear which model we should aspire to. Sorry if this paragraph is overtly political!

Info Vis

One of the interesting artists I came across when researching Info Vis was WardShelley.com. On his Bio it defines him, by not defining him,
"Ward Shelley works as an artist in Brooklyn, New York. He specializes in large projects that freely mix sculpture and performance. Utilizing eclectic influences and a variety of media, Shelley’s installations defy classification. Over the last five years, Shelley has concentrated on bizarre functioning architectural pieces in which he lives and works during the exhibition monitored with live surveillance video equipment.
Shelley also works on a series of diagramatic paintings, timelines of art-related subjects such as the careers of artists working in de-materialized media and the history of art scenes. "

Ward does a huge range of different projects, he has won the New Yorker and New York Times awards and has been referenced in numerous Art and culture Books. AS evident from these awards, he is based primarily in New York, some of his pieces concentrate on Solely on the Avant Garde in New York, one such would be Downtown Body.

Interestingly Shelley also does Info Vis, and he did a series of Oil Paintings, purely coincidentally one of them called "Who Invented the Avant Garde"
exhibition at Pierogi, April 2009.

This is an interesting piece, in ways it almost looks like a Mind map or a brain storm but it is actually a portrayal of accurate Data in a visualised Timeline.

enlarge here

I find his pieces interesting because they are so Old School they are bordering on Steam Punk, and they show there is a true heritage of Information Visualisation and Design Visualisation through portraying this data in an old fashion.

MM4 Semester 2

Back in College February. As part of one of my modules (Avant Garde in Digital Media) I need to set up a separate Blog. Since I have too many blogs already and my project has to do with Data I will be putting these posts here but they'll be labeled Avant Garde. This is the first such post.

Data can be used in many interesting ways and many boring ways. These range from Tescos barcode scanner app to a library database. One of the most interesting Graphical representation of Data I have seen is on Nuclear testing. It is interesting the impact sudden information has on you.

I had previously read plenty of articles and books on Nuclear Weapons development and the cold war but when you see this portrayed Graphically (as it is done in this video titled "1945-1998") in animation it is simply staggering.



Unsurprisingly it is a Japanese man, Isao Hashimoto that came up with this video. He describes it as "... a bird's eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted. I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world."

It shows that although text offers in depth analysis it sometimes fails to get across the actual reality of the subject, the scale, the horror, the enormity. I think this video succeeds at all this very well. It also breaks down barriers of accessability, your average 10 year old would not read an academic paper on Nuclear Proliferation but after seeing this he would have a lot of info an insight that otherwise would require hours of reading.