New media work shows traffic, but not it's impact

As well as recycling code as a way to teach programming, Steph Thirion recently finished Cascade on Wheels, a data vis project attempting to translate abstract traffic stats into a more meaningful, compelling interactive. Beautifully realised in Processing, Cascade extrudes upwards, creating something akin to a spatial bar graph over Madrid - the higher the wall, the more traffic on that street. Responsive and navigable, the user is able to pan, zoom, and explore this new environment of data easily. The problem is, Cascade stops there, failing to make any statement about how, for instance, the 100,000 vehicles per day on El Prado street impacts residents, the environment, and the urban fabric.



Thirion (and the rest of the team) seemed to realise this, and came up with a second vis based on the same data, Traffix Mixer. A sound toy, where "emotion was given prominence over direct readability", Mixer does provide a nice complement to the more strictly infographic Cascade. But unfortunately, the innovative, slick interface compromises the power of the work. " Ah, i forgot how pleasant it sounds... nice to hear it again.", is one comment on the video blog. The sound of a speeding car coming up behind you - as any pedestrian or cyclist can attest- is always unnerving and ominous. Mixers sound, while aggressive, is too abstracted from its subject matter, sounding more like a track from a laptop/glitch artist.


Traffic expands like a virus. The amount of vehicles will always expand to the amount of roadway available. Its effects are also viral and ever expanding. In a landmark study in 1981, Dr. Donald Appleyard demonstrated a direct correlation between the number of friends people have on a street, and the amount of cars travelling on a given street. Even more interestingly, when asked to define their "home area", residents on Appleyard's "Low Traffic" road circled the whole street: their house, the front yards, the footpaths, and even their friends houses. With growing traffic comes growing impact, and a growing retreat. Children on the street stop playing. Adults on the footpath stop conversations. Hanging out in front yards ceases, decks stop being used, and finally in extreme situations, the front room of the house is unused, permeated with traffic noise, horns, and pollution. Traffic Mixer and Cascade on Wheels, while stunningly executed, fail to convey the impact of their subject - either quantitatively or qualitatively.

Guilt or pleasure? Infographics convert from one to another

We Make Money Not Art today briefly mentioned two projects from infographics specialist Michael Mandiberg I've taken a closer look at, Oil Standard and Real Costs, both plugins for Mozillas Firefox web browser. Oil Standard converts US currency amounts into their worth in barrels of crude, a simple premise with it's strength lying in the connectedness of the internet. Running online and using RSS feeds, prices are converted in real-time, rising and falling with the world markets. They're also personalised - the concept becomes much more concrete when it appears over an iPod you're buying online or your own credit card transactions.


Real Costs operates in the same way, albeit on a list of very limited travel websites such as AA.com, JetBlue, and Orbitz. Translating jet miles to kg of CO2 directly on the page, that trip from LA to NYC loses some of it's glamour. The plugin does go further than literal guilt tripping however, providing a range of alternatives like public transport, carbon offsets, and carpools.


But is it all a little too earnestly green? Perhaps. Mandiberg hopes the user might shift "from passive consumer to engaged citizen." With the lack of public transport in the US and the large distances between cities, RL might just have the opposite affect - causing apathy and a sense of helplessness in users. After all, who's wants to spend a few days and nights in a Greyhound bus to make the trek across country? Oil Standard seems simpler, more sinister, and - with the addition of live news feeds from Rigzone.com - much more real. Viewed as an art project, the latter is successful precisely because it doesn't prescribe. Instead it causes a vague but definite malaise in the user, and leaves them to work out any concrete actions or lifestyle changes.

New work on Window: Pippin Barr and Xin Cheng

This month's Online artist at Window is a selection of work from Stimulus Response, "the sprawling web-based diary of Wellington artist, writer, and game theorist Pippin Barr. From comic strips to delicate pencil drawings, interactive video works and maps, Barr chronicles the bizarre, banal, and boring in the everyday."


I've also completed a range of 'additional data' for Xin Cheng's recent show: a massive repository of texts, theses, links, and streaming audio research that provided the basis for the work shown at Window. From green roofs to gannet calls, the psychology of blogging and motorcycles in galleries, there's an array of interesting articles.

Recycling code, Freecycling computers

"Recognize this code?", the designer next to me flipped open a website he was working on and scrolled through a dozen lines of Flash coding. The minimal commenting, the structure a true coder would launch into a rant about. Yeah it was mine. But the site I hadn't seen before. "I've used your code for two more sites since you gave it to me". For this graphic designer, reusing a generic function to scroll through images was easy. Keep the structure the same, alter the type and colourings, and export. It just worked.

Strangely, in this information age, well commented, reusable code is a tangible asset - saving hundreds of real hours. Sites like DZone Snippets have 10,000 users tagging and submitting snippets. Prototype, for Flash developers, has been running for 7+ years now.


More interestingly, a recent workshop on the Processing language in Barcelona showed another trait of good code. Participants had 6 hours to do a "mod" (modification) of the classic arcade game, Breakout. The catch? No one had ever coded before.

Steph Thirion, who conducted the workshop had the "objective of showing the participants that it is not required to understand code to experiment and play with it." The result? A selection of totally compelling, experimental 'sketches' - as they're called in Processing - which abstract the videogame, reinterpreting it in dozens of ways. Glitchy line drawings fill the screen, green blocks flicker on and off like some pixelated Barnett Newman work, cute Tokyo inspired blocks bounce back and forth playfully. With no restraints to make something functional, and no previous experience with code, the results are inspired.

From pixels to paper, the worldwide FreeCycle network adds a twist to the notion of recycling, providing a network for people to post objects to give away, or things they'd like to have, all for free - it's "all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills." The Auckland network currently has 1782 members, with around 10 posts per day, ranging from desk lamps to paint, electric tooth brushes, and Dungeons/Dragons sourcebooks. For those working with technology hardware or music, items like older computers, laptop hard drives, stereo parts, and printers surface regularly.

Building a better laptop

On Tuesday, the One Laptop per Child project started production at a factory in China, mass-producing an initial run of 250,000 models that will go out to children in nations like Nigeria, Thailand and Peru, where they've already been trialled. The bright green casing looks like a rugged alien. The stylized interface is friendly and playful. It's designed for the ground-up for kids. But the team behind it are dead serious.

The OLPC project harnesses and coordinates a large network of volunteer programmers, who refine aspects like security applications which protect against large-scale attacks, compiler optimisation to speed up code-building, remote display for projectors and memory usage minimising.


Because a hard-drive is one of the top items to break on traditional laptops, the XO model features a tiny flash-drive instead. For programmers, this means a return to 80's era coding - building highly functional software in as few lines of script as possible, ditching huge 'code libraries' with big filesize footprints for tiny utilities and more custom work.

In Abuja, Nigeria, the nearest powerpoint could be a long walk away. So it makes sense that the OLPC are pedantic about electricity usage. "For us, every joule matters, and a simplistic 'oh, we mostly have most of a chip turned off, maybe' isn't good enough." The default display mode uses 1 watt of power - 1/7th of the average laptop display. Run out of power? Charge it up again with a hand crank on the side.


In the last few months, the team have put the XO through it's paces: developing hour-long 'smoke tests', tracking down obscure bugs in the kernel, localising keyboards for West Africa and Nepal, optimising rendering, and refining to stabilised builds. The prototype hardware has been tested to destruction in the factory, as well as the acid test - children on playgrounds in Peru, jungle field trips in Thailand, and the dust of Maharashtra, India.

Images from OLPC Project, available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5

Online artists tackle "AER" quality through exhibition

Belching through the city of Aachen in Germany on huge Mercedes-Benz flatbeds, Eve Andrée Laramée's "Parks on Trucks" is just one of the works shown in the "AER Project", an exhibition curated and released today by Andrea Pollie at Hunter College in New York.


Other standouts include Translator II: Grower, by Sabrina Raaf, a Mars-like rover with a much more down to earth mission, to monitor and visualise levels of CO2 in a room. Raaf balances what could be a patronising, overly-scientific piece with her execution - the robot draws grass along the walls with childlike glee, each blade corresponding to current carbon dioxide amounts.


My favourite was SuperGas by SuperFlex, a "simple, portable biogas unit that can produce sufficient gas for the cooking and lighting needs of an African family." Visually strong, the huge orange blog resembles a giant Claes Oldenberg piece. But more interesting was the stance towards the "art", shifting the traditional concept from representation to tool, a practical object that invites participation and heavy use - deriving as much from the fields of engineering, science, and agriculture as contemporary art. Currently SuperGas is being tested in the field in Cheing Mai, Thailand.


Unfortunately after very tangible pieces like SuperGas and Parks on Trucks, works like Amy Balkin's Public Smog appear overly conceptual at best, pretentious and ineffectual at worst. And while the project's page disclaims that "Public Smog is no substitute for direct action", the piece requires too much suspension of reality to even work as an exercise in raising awareness.

Help not wanted: Rise of the nanobusiness

Right now, over 2,000 people a day in the US are going into business for themselves, according to the US Census bureau (quoted in Tomorrow's Trends). The USA Today recently published "Microbusinesses find huge benefits in outsourcing", and Small Biz Trends followed up with posts like "Single Person Business Booming".

In New Zealand, where 85% of all businesses are less than 5 people, this is less trend than standard practice. But while locally this results from a smaller population, internationally it's much more of a conscious decision. Turned off (or made redundant) by large corporates like WalMart, Ford, and HP, and turned on by a new interconnectedness online, single-person or nano businesses are finding success - and ethics they can live with.

More competition means cutting costs. And for many corporates, this means importing products from China, which can result in a 20% to 40% cost savings. 23 recalls of toy products were done last year alone in the US, featuring items like bears with toxic paint and a floating eyeball filled with kerosene.


Checkout the pages of the web's newest startups and nanobusinesses, and you'll find a different approach. Tanya Thompson, founder of successful clothing label Misery states in Idealog "she doesn't have to look further than any city mall for an example of what she doesn't want to happen to Misery." Local fashion designer Mala Brajkovic doesn't need to worry about sweatshops - her small team of designers assemble, cut, and sew her new lines in a loft in Newmarket.

"There’s certainly money to be made from stripmining users, as proven by the numerous malware providers.....but we firmly believe that doing right by our users is the best way to build a sustainable, successful company", says Flock, makers of an innovative social web browser of the same name. Monome, a small collective creating open source sound instruments, states that "by working with small, local companies we hope to foster long-term relationships, gain more insight and control over production, and actually witness our products’ progression." Seth Godin, in his landmark post titled "Small is the new Big", picks up this new ethical awareness with one of his many plusses: "Small means you can tell the truth on your blog".

Green pixels: Thinking sustainable in art and technology

From An Inconvenient Truth to LiveEarth, terms like 'sustanability' and 'carbon-neutral' have been thrown around frequently lately. But what does it mean for us working in the arts and technology space here in New Zealand?

"The little rivulet down the hill has to pretty much dry up for this to happen! However 23mm of rain the other day has brought it back to its normal capacity. Yippee, the coffee maker can be started up again."

The quote above, taken from Thinking Unlimited, is a response, albeit one which might send a groan through the average tech-savvy artist. But electricity consumption is at the heart of the digital space, so it makes sense that's where bloggers like Mark Ontkush start. His post stating that "An all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts.” led to an all-black version of Google, titled Blackle. And while the intent is there, posters to the ADA list looked past the hype, calculating that the savings here are negligible.

> > > BTW, this 750 megawatt-hours/year is not actually very much at all.
> > > If you convert it to megawatt hours per hour, which is to say,
> > > megawatts:
> > >
> > > 750 / (365 * 24) = 0.0856
> > >
> > > you get 85 kW. Heaters, kettles, and vacuum cleaners use in the
> > > order of 2kW each

Programmers working on alternative operating system Linux have focused on power heavily in the last few months, releasing a series of patches that aim to conserve and minimise whenever possible - such as backlighting and a new 'tickless idle' feature. Normally processors 'wake up' every millisecond to keep the system clock going and synced, tickless idle disables this function, resulting in a cooler, less power hungry processor that's truly idle. This PowerTOP project demonstrates some of the basic plusses for open source - their channel regularly has between 30 and 50 volunteer coders exchanging ideas, contributing features, and fixing patches. Their reward (besides saving the earth) is something much more tangible - their laptop batteries last a few hours longer.