All these remixes are created by Kirby Ferguson

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

Volume one

The application created using openFrameworks is used to select the area where to track the depth (excluding people around the swing to be included in the computation) and then map the average gray of the main blob in this area to the z property of a camera. In order to keep moving in the galaxy, when users move forward they go twice as fast as when then go backward. The minimalistic rendering is intentionally very simple. It consists of generative squares drawn in OpenGL. For the anaglyph mode, a very simple openGL trick gives quite good results too.

Lab212

Deluge is a C++ application designed to answer these questions. The underlying data was generated by cross referencing 8 million tax records from 2006 and 2007 to track changes in postal codes.

Norwegian tax returns

In Norway the incomes and fortunes of all tax paying individuals are made public every year. Historically the records were only available as printed matter, but at some point the tax authorities decided to make the records available to news organisations as machine readable files. Though it may seem radical I believe this practice is essentially beneficial in a social democracy with a high level of personal taxation and a great welfare system. The press occasionally runs a few stories on monied individuals with clever accountants, so this seems to work to a certain degree.

In addition to writing a few beneficial stories the press has used this data as the basis for two other activities: news on celebrity earnings and SEO optimized pages for every tax payer. These are pages we constantly stumble across on Google when simply were trying find someone’s phone number.

Data as granular as this is usually reserved for government administration, not handed out to the press. The underlying data set lists over 4 million individuals. It contains full name, year of birth, postal code and their attendant financial data. I was annoyed by the lack of investigation the press had given this information and asked if I could have a hard look at it on behalf of the news organization our company works with.

Uniquing tax payers

It seemed interesting to track people across years and it turns out only 70.000 Norwegians aren’t unique by name of year of birth. If you subtract these you’re left with 3.950.000 unique tax payers. As we have the postal codes for each person we can track who moved between 2006 and 2007.

Crowdsourced postal codes

The practice of transparency regarding tax returns should not be taken to indicate that public Norwegian agencies are extremely generous with their data. Even though we have everyone’s income listed on Google the Norwegian postal agency doesn’t publish the positions or bounds of postal codes. Yet, thanks to a private initiative by Erik Bolstad, this information has been made public through a crowdsourced effort (awesome).

Initial sketch

A sketch was made with a subset of the data in a 3D software package. It had a limit of a few thousand particles, but it did seem somewhat promising

Under 35 year olds with under 100.000 Norwegian kroners income.

Showing everything

The data begs the question: if the patterns of everyone moving in one year could be compressed into one short animation, what would could it look like? If you want this visual answer in realtime and with a decent framerate the volume of information pushes the problem just North of what you can accomplish with Processing or interepreted languages. I don’t have much experience with C++, but luckily I got to spend two weeks with a good friend and our families in a storm ravaged resort.

Simen has had plenty of experience writing low level code in building his open source CNC motion control GRBL software and could assist during a couple of late evenings in getting a quick prototype running with the Cinder OpenGL libraries. When running Word and the latest OSes computers may seem to running at approximately the same clip they did 10 years ago, but wonders have happenend when you get sufficiently close to the hardware.

Conclusion

When running at full speed the visualization is clearly lacking in terms of salient features, yet I find it interesting. Then again, I like looking at Pachinko machines and waterfalls – processes comfortably stuck between the random and the ordered. When slowing the animation down and filtering for certain demographies it becomes more useful. At its best laymen, like myself, can visually perceive facets of the national Norwegian migratory process that before were only available through the statistical calculations of researchers in demography.

In 2010, scientists succeeded in recreating a miniature version of the Big Bang. Within a few years, some of the universe’s deepest secrets may be unlocked.

Genesis is a story that revolves around a machine that has the power of creating new, miniature universes. By controlling the universe rotation, it can speed up the time and evolution of the miniature worlds, and with the help of a fancy search engine it can pin point and extract terrestrial planets. Well, it’s not very scientifically correct by any means.. Or is it..? Who knows, you might live in a manufactured miniature world..

Anyway, what would mankind do if they possessed the power of creating new worlds? Probably use it for creating some kind of decorative snow globe. Guaranteed gift of the year.

Well, it’s not all science fiction, I actually got inspired after reading some interesting articles about the European science agency CERN, who designed the world’s biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. This accelerator shoot beams around a freezing 27km concrete ring underground near Geneva, smashing atoms together in search of the elusive “God particle” believed present at the Big Bang.

Since it began operating at the end of March 2010, CERN engineers and physicists have created billions of miniature versions of the Big Bang, revealing fundamental insights into the nature of the cosmos. Physicists also hope the collider will help them see and understand other suspected phenomena, such as dark matter, antimatter and supersymmetry.

Also, at Lancaster University in UK, physicists unraveling the secrets of how to build a universe. In fact, they have already formed one, or something very much like it. This scientific breakthrough lies in the bottom of a chamber no larger than a pinky finger, filled with helium and cooled to 0.0003 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero.

Invited to the project by Hermann Weizenegger – Stephan Thiel was responsible for designing the overall interface between the music by composer and violinist miki and the production process of the robot.Hermann’s vision, Stephan writes, consisted of five variations of a musical piece by MIKI represented in five objects. To address this vision, wax was chosen as a base material, since it allowed rapid manufacturing through milling and application of heat as well as a possible further use for casting.

Thus, the performance was conceptualized as a two stages production process showing MIKI and a pianist along the robot manufacturing the objects. In a pre-performance process, the wax base shapes were milled to reflect the musical atmosphere, in the second process the robot finalized the objects with the use of a Bunsen burner in reaction to MIKI’s play.

Project Page on Stephan’s Site

The app scans the users internet activity and finds his “needs”, then finds people in the immediate area who can answer this need. Such as: Movie producer looking for actors and an actor looking for a job sitting in the same coffee shop without knowing, person with start-up idea and investor, person with inspiration and designer…

* The users can share their needs and search opportunities for each other in relatively distant locations.
* By using information like facebook events, the users can find future opportunities in their area.
* By shifting the device, the user can add or remove information layers from the map.

The principles followed by this app are belief in the power of face2face meeting, and finding stuff “on the way” without the active search itself.

“Wouter van Buuren is not only a photographer, he is also an acrobat.” That’s how one art gallery describes, perhaps too mildly, the 39-year-old Dutch photographer who scales utility poles, tip-toes across bridges, and climbs out the windows of skyscrapers to capture breathtaking vistas of cities and rural landscapes from the top of the man-made world.