Human Mosaic Systems Blog

An Artistic Exploration of What is an Avatar by Glyph Graves

 "Antarctica- An Individual Existence" by Glyph Graves. A dynamic, live data feed piece.

Artwork Machinima link to "Antarctica - An Individual Existence"

Glyph Graves is considered one of the great artists in Second Life. In real life he is a geneticist and evolutionary biologist in Sidney Australia. ( You will find one of his interactive pieces, Organic Recurve, at my HMS site. Google him to read more about his incredible installations, including those with IBM and to see the wealth of stunning images of his many works.).

His work has won numerous awards and often finds creative ways to push narrative immersion into the conversation of the work. Glyph's and other SL artists' works drive me to find a way to take this brave new direction they are taking and incorporate it into the immersive environment of 3D simulations to help create paradigm shifts in our understanding of the world around us.

This recent unique artwork shown in the machinima linked above explores the concept of what is an avatar through the use of live feed data.

Description of the dynamic live data feed piece, "Antarctica - An Individual Existence":

Created in Second life using real time data from 19 automated weather stations in Antarctica

Antarctica .. a continent of of ice, rock and wind that for most of its frozen expanse rises above the sea as the Antarctic High Plateau around 3000 meters. This piece brings the continent into a virtual world and poses the question : What is an avatar?

The word avatar is not a new word
--noun
1. Hindu Mythology. the descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate form or some manifest shape; the incarnation of a god.
2. an embodiment or personification, as of a principle, attitude, or view of life.
3. Computers. a graphical image that represents a person, as on the Internet.

This piece is a personification of a continent, and a fragment of its current (real time ) existence is projected into virtual in the same way that we project a fragment of ourselves into SL and call it our avatar .

It speaks as a symphony of music that is generated by the wind direction from location across its body. Its form is described by the height and position of its parts. Its skin ( the thin layer of air just above the ice) coloured by its temperature.

As this is real time the composition will change from hour to hour, day to day as the conditions at each of the 19 locations on the continent change giving a song of Antarctica.

While the discs are visible as well as touching the disc there is also a colour scale that will tell you the temperature at each site at a glance.

This piece has two phases

Phase One

The first incarnation personifies the continent ice cover as a human figure.

It stands then breaks into its component parts. Each part is a real location on Antarctica, the site of an weather station that is streaming real time data on the conditions.

Phase Two

The second incarnation transforms into separate discs and takes the last 20 readings from each of the 19 weather stations (about the last 5 hours with the last being current).

Each disc represents an automated weather station and contains a set of individual notes. The direction of the wind at that location determines which note from each set is played at each location. NB there are no sound loops rather notes are generated one at a time depending on the wind direction.

The direction of the wind is also given by the direction of the texture animation and the particle stream.

The speed of the wind is given by the speed of the texture animation and the density of the particle stream.

The temperature is signified by colour - red is the hottest and bright blue the coldest. If it goes over 0 degrees it will begin to drip.

The relative height of the discs conform to the height of the weather station.


Technical aspects and Acknowledgements

I take the data from the web, pipe it though my hosted web site and transform it into music and colour.

It uses several transformations that are facilitated via scripts that modify the primitive parameters of each unlinked prim in the piece.

For the height of the station I have used the barometric pressure in the same way it is used by an aeroplanes altimeter. Any difference due to temperature or local air pressure changes is negligible compared to the variation caused by altitude.

The data is provided by the University of Wisconsin Madison through its AWS site and I gratefully acknowledge their permission to use it.

I pull the information from that site and then pre-processed on my hosted site ( I learnt php for this project)

Each element in the piece then request the last 20 readings ( about the last 5 hours ). I use the temperature, wind speed, wind direction and barometric pressure.

All scripts (off world and inworld), sculpts and textures are my own.

The music come from sets of notes in each element. I utilise 4 instruments to create the symphony.

Ghost Blow notes created by Jovica - www.freesound.org
flute - by Lorin Tone
Chord set by Lorin Tone.
Violin notes London Philharmonic

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Process.org

A new way to visualize the diverse data that surrounds our world.

Free, open source programming language whose site includes tutorial on how to start designing and working with it. Imagine combining this into a 3D environment!

Link: Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions. Initially developed to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing also has evolved into a tool for generating finished professional work. Today, there are tens of thousands of students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists who use Processing for learning, prototyping, and production.

Example of use:

The Emergence Project
by Daniel Sauter, Mark Hereld

Realtime art installation that explores how complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of simple interactions.

 

"Crowds and Clouds: Data, Sheep, and Collaboration in the Works of Aaron Koblin" by MIT World

The visualization of dynamic systems where information assumes forms both abstract and familiar...

 

About the Lecture

Where others see just data points and fodder for bar graphs, Aaron Koblin visualizes dynamic systems where information assumes forms both abstract and familiar. In this talk, Koblin shares recent projects that meld statistical science and art to convey a really big picture, while often inviting the viewer to partake in a more personal experience.

Koblin explores those “interesting traces” left after humans interact with each other and with computers -- what he calls “data trails.” One work, Flight Patterns, depicts the flow of air traffic over North America in a 24-hour period. The east and west coasts light up in sequence, and lines shoot out of great cities in swarms at busy times of day, like brain scans showing bursts of activity among neural centers.

Koblin is not simply fascinated by a bird’s-eye view of human networks. In the Sheep Market, he seeks to “juxtapose the humanity of an individual process with a gigantic, alienated system.” With the help of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, software that allows online users to contribute a tiny part of a large project for very little compensation, Koblin collected thousands of drawings of “a sheep facing left.” The result is a black and white mosaic of 10,000 Lilliputian animals, each one of which when selected emerges as an individual drawing. (Participants were paid two cents a head). Similarly, in Ten Thousand Cents, online participants drew a tiny piece of a $100 bill (for a penny). The collage, “the largest distributed forgery project on the planet,” looks remarkably like the real thing when viewed from afar, but says Koblin, “if you drill in, you can see smiley faces, stippling, and sketching” -- a wild variety of artistic styles. He has tested the crowd-sourcing concept with audio as well, creating a version of “Daisy Bell” for 2,000 sampled voices, which “sounds like a pack of gremlins,” or HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey on steroids.

Koblin’s work maps comfortably onto the music video world. His tribute to Johnny Cash features a multitude of drawings by fans, and he collaborated on a “music video without video” for Radiohead that employed laser scanners and light patterns. Koblin wants to marshal data, as well as the collective intelligence of the Internet, to create a meaningful experience on a human scale. “I nerd out on a lot of this technology stuff,” Koblin admits, but he also suggests there is no point to art without “emotional resonance.”