Tag Archive for 'visualization'

Page 2 of 2

Spectral interventions visited upon tourists

Published on 2 July 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Julius von Bismarck with his creation

The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.

In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby that is being used with a flash. It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. The intervention is unobtrusive because it takes only a few milliseconds. Every photo another photographer takes of an object at which the Fulgurator is also aimed is affected by the manipulation. Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others.

Herr Bismarck’s creation is so powerful because he breaches what is assumed to be an impermeable frontier. The photograph, in some ways, is supposed to be the paragon of realism when it comes to documenting the world. Yet here is this device that can be deployed tactically in moments of performance to intervene how photographers, as such, perceive the moment. It is marvelous that most people who would use flash photography during the day in places like Checkpoint Charlie are going to be hapless tourists who, instead of confronting the history and visceral experience before them, snap away so that they may keep themselves busy and make something of the trip. Perhaps this is precisely the sort of person upon whom a mysterious intervention, a ghostly cue, would be best received by. Hmm, but I only wish that someone could get one of these into a presidential news conference and strike the requisite sub-text into the photographic record for the morning papers.



[via]

Mapping infrastructure, part 2

Published on 17 June 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Just came across this advertisement from a September 1914 edition of Modern Mechanix [via the Map Room] that shows all of the telephone exchanges that existed in the US at that time. (Aside: in a North American phone number, the “555″ is the exchange: 1-XXX-555-YYYY). Propoganda value asside, it is quite a fascinating map. We see that the highest density of exchanges originated in Pittsburgh and extended out like a large sneeze all across the Midwest (who would have thought?). Ahh, to imagine a time when Florida was just a backwater swamp and California had roughly the same telecommunications density as North Dakota. I bet Detroit was just twitching to become an industrial powerhouse…

Infrastructure visualization

Published on 16 June 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Ben Fry, a data visualization artist and teacher, compiled the above image of the US. As he describes it,

All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population.

While not terribly profound, it is an interesting inversion: geography as an emergent property of infrastructure. Fry mentions elsewhere that one of the reasons he omitted Hawaii and Alaska was because this relationship is not visible.

I rather like looking at a crop of the image, and watching these nameless towns become nodes in a web traced out by roadways, looking almost like bacterial cultures. It is almost like looking up into the sky and seeing all the different stars, some bright, some dim, wondering what those worlds must be like.

Project website with higher resolution close ups

Fry’s commentary and sketch of the technical process involved

Geospatial imaging and human rights

Published on 15 June 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Wired today featured a profile of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) efforts to bring satellite reconnaissance photography to bear upon human rights violations within closed societies like North Korea and disputed territories like the Gaza Strip. They work with NGO’s and regional groups to help provide and disseminate documentary evidence of acts of violence to the world community.

Visualizing human atrocities from the perspective that these images afford is a quite a complicated thing to do. One can look at an aerial view of Auschwitz, for instance, of prisoners lined up, tracing a curved line, to be processed through the gate. But the whole scene still resolves at such a clinical level. One can illustrate and argue from miles in the air, but can one provide the visceral force of documentation needed to rouse the world’s intervention? After the fact, when the picture has meaning and history behind it, certainly, it can be quite compelling and have an almost a voyeuristic magnetism to it. This was where they would shoot them. This is the creek that the ashes were dumped in. But how do we understand it, how do we relate to the reality in these images?

Static images reimagined

Published on 14 June 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , .

It will be interesting to see how, or if, this technology is used commercially. Encountering this perspective for the first time, before it has had time to absorb into one’s common place, certainly rings with a bit of the “oh cool” factor. The so-called “Direct Image Manipulation” has the effect of interrupting the way we usually interact with and conceive of video. The fulcrum shifts and we are presented with objects in motion almost more so than we are a sequence of images. The video becomes almost more of a captured reality than a photographic record (but, of course, thats what they used to say about photography).

You can download a video player from the project website that lets you manipulate any .avi video files in this way. The program itself seems to work pretty well after it scans the video file frame by frame, creating an index that drives its functionality.

A seperate project, created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, is able to create an entire “geometric context” [read also as a 3-d space] from a single flat image. Very cool, almost like the esper machine from Blade Runner. The project website can be found here.