The 3rd video for Everything is A Remix.

What was once an beautifying artifact to data crunchers has now gone mainstream, popularized by infographics on high traffics websites (Mashable and Jess3 you are to blame), a deluge of copy+paste graphics for the social age.

What’s perhaps more subtle but rather interesting, is the extension of this subset of visual narrative to the physical world, taking data visualization to more concrete forms of media, beyond the flat representation of digital images.

From the groundbreaking piece by Aaron Koblin for Radiohead, to the more recent work by Dentsu+Berg with iPad light painting, we  bayanlar witness the rise of ubiquitous infographics, were real surfaces become both data sets and data surfaces.

It’s time to acknowledge a future vision less screen-centric and more projection-centric (Microsoft shows a glimpse of it here), were each surface can both display data sources and act as data source.

If you find these examples still too digital, there’s a couple of more concrete ones:

The Handmade visualization toolkit by Jose Duarte

All rights reserved by jose.duarte

Keyboard Frequency Sculpture by Mike Knuepfler

3-way street visualization

(though just a study, just think of the interaction with Google Car)

A real world pie-chart stencil/maker by the new media artist Golan Levin

Real Ideal for Intel Labs

The Watermarks Project

via Osocio

If our allure with infographics extends to the physical world, seo brands and organizations creating ukash concrete forms of data viz (or even augmented visualization) can easily explore our current fascination. One warning though: don’t mistake pretty graphics with lack of clarity and reasoning when interpreting data.

Cross-posted at The Trendwatch

The trailer above should be enough to seduce fans, but why stop there? And instead of the regular blockbuster campaign why not appeal to the geeky teenager and entice the astrophysicist within? That’s exactly what the agency Hide&Seek, Warner Bros. and Oxford University did, “bringing hardcore astrophysics and superhero movie fans together”.

At StudyTheSkyes.com, fans and aspiring astrophysicists can be explorers of The Zooniverse, a science project that allows internet users analyse photographic data generated by some of the worldâ€s largest telescopes, and pass their findings for the research teams. Os as some say in marketing lingo, crowdsourcing. But in a geeky-milky way :)

So how does this relates to the character Green Lantern? Well, because the task at hand (tutorial above) would be looking for ‘bubbles†produced by the formation of stars, that show up as … Green Rings.

Yeah, i know it’s geeky, but also a refreshing approach to movie campaigns.

Brastemp, a Brazilian electronics brand shows how you can be interactive with radio. The campaign was so successful that it was replicated in Portugal by a couple of radios.

The spot, that aired simultaneously in 11 major radio stations in the capital city, suggested: “Right now, millions of people at their cars, listening to the radio. All serious, sleepy, until an inspiration changes everything. We invite you to smile to the driver next to you. If he heard it, he’ll smile back …. See? Inspiration changes everything and life becomes just likeee… a Brastemp. “

Interactive goes beyond online communication and starts to explore new frontiers, from outdoor advertising to context sensitive ads (Minority Report, anyone?). Take for instance a shopping center in Portugal, promoting a witchcraft fair with an outdoor taking sensors and measuring the amount of people who walked underneath the ladder.

Would you call this digital? maybe. But interactive it definitely is.

If Leo Burnett did the above being a somewhat traditional agency, you can expect digital agencies to do the same. R/GA is breaking down walls, exploring new areas such as event marketing or data visualization, while creating and producing commercials. But they surely kept their interactive background.

It’s the evolve or die time for digital agencies, and they could start by dropping the digital.

On a side note, the same thing happens regarding ‘social media’. Even if the most experienced web professionals call it ‘social web’, the former has become so popular with the press, that it’s hard to escape from this broadcast view.

Digital or social is not about the media. It’s about how people behave on those channels. Or as it’s often called, culture.

If the above gorgeous piece of film wasn’t enough, now follows Radiolab Hyper Audio Player, based on the same episode.

Henrik Moltke took the amusing conversation of radio hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, built a custom HTML5 player, mixed it with Popcorn.js (a javascript framework for multimedia assets) and added the collaborative features of Soundcloud, the music sharing platform.

If we’re used to think of semantics regarding hypertext, this experiment ‘shows’ how this semantic value can be added to multimedia content. For instance, when a comment or image is added by Rabiolab on Soundcloud track it generates the corresponding visual cue on the player, incorporating Creative Commons images. Another feature uses one of Henrik’s experiments Hyperdisken, to get the show transcript.

Interactive creativity is not only about visual; sources can be found in audio also.

Don’t have an iPhone? Try the website.

Just shows how dead trees media can still be relevant on this digital age. Sort of.

To excuse myself for lack of preparation, i’ll share the original presentation, with presenter notes so you could get a few more ideas about Advertising, Propagation and the importance of Application Programming Interfaces. Below, the SlideShare version.

And congratulations to Ricardo and his team for pulling such a great event.

Ricardo Sousa and his talented young team rolls out the 2011 edition in Oporto (Portugal), the next 16th and 17th of April, and yours truly was kindly invited to speak a few minutes on the subject of advertising, fire and jogging. Now that you’re curious, are you attending SWITCH Conference? If yes, give me a nudge as i’d really love to chat with you. Not networking. Hate that word. See ya in a few days then. Go buy your ticket, now.