I have been promising that I would like to upload all of the articles I have written over the years so that they might be of use for people rather than them languishing on my hard drive, but I’ve been a bit slack at actually doing so because converting them to decent HTML and fixing it all up takes a bit of time.

But Regine’s post on Visualizing: tracing an aesthetics of data inspired me to find the article on Jonathan Harris that I wrote a while back in 2004.

So, the plan from here on in is to upload one article from the archives per week (which would mean about two year’s worth of posts!).

Man of the Hour – Jonathan Harris

If recent world events have taught us anything about the media it must surely be that it is relentless organism. We have seen live videophone feeds from the frontline in Iraq, the explosion of blogging and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news feeds and recently mobile phone camera images on the front pages of newspapers. Use any RSS news reader and you will see stories being updated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With all this information flying around the Web, how can we make sense of it all and what would an hourly snapshot look like? That is exactly the question Jonathan Harris set out to answer with his 10×10 project. In an ironic twist the site held the number one slot on Blogdex for several days as news of its representation of news spread around the Web.

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Originally from Vermont in the United States, Harris had a traditional Beaux-Arts training before studying computer science at Princeton University. As is often the case with those that have studied both the arts and computing, Harris developed an eye for how their intersection might shed light on the chaos of life. At Princeton he developed a program called Extra!Extra!that gathered similar news stories from over 75 sources around the world, so that you could read multiple accounts of the same story and glean a more balanced perspective. “It was a lot like Google News, one year before Google News,” he says. “In some ways, 10×10 was a natural extension of Extra!Extra!, but more about images and less about media bias.”

Throughout Harris’s earlier work, there is a strong emphasis on information design, from posters on world debt and health to re-interpreting cartography, many of which formed part of his work at the Princeton International Networks Archive.

“I’ve always found hidden patterns fascinating,” he explains. “As a little kid, I had this wonderful book called Trouble For Trumpets, by Peter Cross. It was filled with vastly intricate illustrations of this fictitious world, inhabited by a race of fuzzy orange creatures called Trumpets. Hiding in the pictures were a series of objects – faces gnarled into tree bark, banjos inside daffodils, mollusks in the moon. I would spend hours on end with this book, always convinced there were more hidden patterns to discover. Fast forward fifteen years to the present day, and I’m confronted with a whole new set of tools to escalate pattern finding to a global, real-time, hugely meaningful level.

“The Web has allowed us to look at humanity holistically, more or less, drawing conclusions about what matters in a given moment. A dataset like the Web is massively daunting, but if you can find meaningful niches to examine, it’s also massively inspiring. I’m intrigued by the idea of a collective unconscious, influencing us all in the same way, causing us to make the same choices as others, without knowing it.”

10×10 is, as most great ideas are, relatively simple in conception. It consists of a ten by ten grid of images, with an associated list of 100 words. The data is collected from several news sources (Reuters, the BBC and The New York Times) every hour. Harris’s code analyses the data and works out which are the most important words and pictures of the hour. Although Harris says that it “runs with no human intervention and makes no comment on news media bias”, the choice of (albeit well-respected) news sources does pass comment on the focus of the Western media because it quite clearly shows what news is decreed as important by those institutions. Harris plans to do a similar version including non-Western media or blog feeds in the future.

“It’s an ambitious idea and a controversial statement to claim to encapsulate an hour on planet earth,” he admits.“I expected to field a lot of heavy criticism. I was shocked and amazed by the overwhelmingly positive response. Within two days of its launch, over 90,000 unique visitors had seen 10×10, it was one of the top ten links on the entire web for several days, and I started receiving hundreds of emails a day from people all over the world, some of which were surprisingly emotional, as people were truly moved by what they saw in the grid.

Harris describes November 11th, the day Yasser Arafat died, as crystallizing 10×10′s true nature for him when almost the entire grid was filled with pictures of the Palestinian leader.He feels it is a little like being a reclusive photographer on a rooftop, snapping away at the hustle and bustle below, detached from the emotion of it all. “ When there’s a 9/11, or an Arafat death, 10×10 is there to record our reaction,” he says.

For something that has had such a wide resonance with the online community, Harris is not terribly inspired by the Web. “[Inspiration] usually comes from observing normal people in the world, and then thinking about how their experiences could be quantified and revealed, sometimes using the Web as a data source. My next project will be about Internet porn. It’s the most popular part of the Web, and one of the least often analysed.”

Another project, WordCount is an interactive visualization of the 88,000 most frequently used English words ranked and scaled in one long sentence (“Andy” is 3,352^nd beating “Desktop” at 5,459^th). Of course “the” is at the number one slot, but perhaps more revealing is QueryCount, which maps the most commonly searched for words within WordCount.

“I noticed that when people used WordCount, they rarely searched for common words like ‘the’,” explains Harris. “By being so common, such words render themselves uninteresting. People tended to search instead, first for their name, and then for sexual words. I was curious to see whether this tendency was only shared by my ribald friends, or whether it applied to all users of WordCount. To answer this question, I created QueryCount, [which] has now logged hundreds of thousands of WordCount queries, and the top 30 or so words read like the public television censorship list.” No prizes for guessing which word beginning with ‘F’ is at the number one spot (oddly enough “celebration” is the least searched for word).

We can expect to see more of Harris’s work as he is currently on a residency at Fabrica in Italy, Benetton’s Research and Development Communication Centre (Update: Of course he’s no longer there – AP). Several other projects can be found at Number 27 as well as at his production company’s site, Flaming Toast (Update: Flaming Toast was subsumed by Number 27 since this article was written – AP). As if that wasn’t enough, he is also co-founder of a designer breath mint company called Oral Fixation Mints, which incidentally, has a beautiful website, just in case all that bad news leaves a nasty taste in your mouth.

This article was originally published in Desktop Magazine, January Issue, 2005. There are also several other posts on Playpen about Jonathan’s Harris more recent works that you might be interested in.

©2004 Andy Polaine & Niche Media Pty. Ltd. This article is not covered by Playpen’s general Creative Commons Licence.

[tags]writing, archives, interviews, articles, work, jonathan harris, desktop[/tags]

I’ve played with Processing a fair bit over the years, but never really got stuck into anything solid – most of my time has been spent fixing up my students’ projects!

Over the break I’ve been playing with some other ideas, working through the very good book by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve ever read in terms of introducing and explaining how to code for people without a computer science background.

Inspired by Robert Hodgin’s wonderful Processing work I thought I’d have another crack at particles as they seem to be all the rage at the moment. The particle creation part is easy, but getting them to interact with decent physics was getting too much for my mathematically challenged brain. Thankfully I came across the Traer Physics Engine by Jeffrey Traer Bernstein, which handles a lot of that maths for you.

My “Hello World!” code for any platform tends to be a bouncing ball (or an array of them) because it covers most of the structures – if…then, variables, arrays, etc.

So I started building and engine that has a bunch of particles that are all attracted to each other, but more attracted to a single one which is following a target invisible bouncing ball around the screen. (It would make more sense to collapse the particles into the ball code, but at the moment I’m just plugging stuff together.)

It’s very simple at the moment – just an ellipse as the graphic with some trails going on. The above is a version that rendered out in non-realtime with 20,000 particles. I like the way they seem to rope together and struggle to break free. Sometimes there’s a kind of breakaway flare.

There’s also a bit of gravity going on, which drags everything down. Any particles that go off the bottom of the screen are simply recycled up the top (you’ll see this in the initial explosion). A interesting upshot of this is that sometimes the tail of the flare/rope falls off the bottom and those particles make a break for it from the top.

You can play with a 2,000 particle version of it here (and view the source code)..

There are also a couple of other versions on Vimeo.

[tags]processing, particles, generative, video, vimeo[/tags]

Following on from my last post about Hereafter, my podcast interview with Matt Clark from United Visual Artists is now online at Core77.

We chat about a range of UVA’s work, process and interactivity. Matt gives some great insights into working across disciplines and the exciting and emerging field of interactive installations much more tightly integrated into architecture rather than being a last-minute add-on, as well as using their skills and techniques to create stunning visuals for video. My thanks to Matt for his time – have a listen and let me know what you think.

If you have been missing the sound of my voice (or have no idea what my faltering, mumbling sounds like) the podcast of my seminar at Urban Learning Space about Creative Collaboration and The Future of Education that I posted about a couple of weeks back is now available from ULS’s iTunes feed.

There’s a PDF of the presentation (which also had a lot of animation not in the PDF) that accompanies it.

It’ll be almost like you were there.

I’m very pleased to have been invited to speak at Flash on the Beach in Brighton. FOTB runs from 4th- – 7th November and my session is on the last day.

I feel a little bit of a cheat here as I’m not really known as a ‘Flash guy’ (and my students will know that I’ve railed on Flash plenty of times before – but, hey, the latest version really is a lot better). But as many of the speakers are going to be going into depth about their Flash work and techniques, I thought I would instead talk about approaches and a bit of history.

So, I’m going to be giving a presentation called Playful Revolutions, which really came out of the presentation that I gave at magneticNorth that Brendan Dawes invited me to give. He said “antirom were revolutionary, tell them about that!”, which is a bit like being invited to “tell people how great you are”, which I’m not and can’t.

However, looking back over all those projects (good and bad) as well as things-I-wish-I-had-done turned out to be an interesting process. I think there is always a danger of re-inventing the wheel now that so many Wheel 2.0s are out there, so a bit of history (albeit short) is probably a good thing.

If you’re going to be a Flash on the Beach, or just live in Brighton really, let me know. It would be nice to catch up.

I’m going to be giving a seminar called Creative Collaboration and the Future of Education at Urban Learning Space in Glasgow who have a number of really interesting projects concerning future ways of working, playing, thinking and learning.

I’ll be presenting the Creative Waves 2007 – VIP project in detail, talking about the using a design process and creative collaboration for cross-disciplinary projects as well as a look at the issues facing the future of education. Much of which I have developed since writing about these issues a while back. I’m planning a bit of a brainstorming session with the attendees too. There will hopefully be a podcast and a download of the presentation on the ULS website afterwards.

It would be great to catch up with any of you there and if you want to get in touch before hand, please do.

Details are: 30 August 2007, 10am – 12.30pm. It’s free, but you need to contact Yvonne Kincaid to register.

I was clearing out some old CDs and found a Videobrasil XII one with this Antirom RGB performace on it. I think Gisela may have shot the footage as there are also some interviews with us at the Antirom office (looking very young). But I’m not sure where this performance was and have no doubt violated someone’s copyright.

Sorry about the ultra-compressed low quality, it was a Cinepak, tiny QT movie and the framerate seems a bit broken too, but it gives you a good idea of the flavour and atmosphere of the performance all those years ago.

[UPDATE: I've re-compressed and re-uploaded the video above (and removed the old one). It's still pretty rough, but the frame-rate is better.]

<img src=’http://www.polaine.com/playpen/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/sagmeister_pigmobiles.jpg’ alt=’Stefan Sagmeister’s designs for a touring protest about US spending’ />

The latest issue of Desktop is out with an article by me called A New Set of Design Principles. It’s based on interviews with Stefan Sagmeister and [Milton Glaser](http://www.miltonglaser.com] that examine the role of graphic design (and design in general) in dealing with ethics, sustainability and the general cultural shift that is happening (or needs to happen). Like it or not, designers are intimately bound up with a culture of seduction and consumption and we all need to think about how that can work positively rather than just selling toys to children made by children.

The Desktop version online is the short version. You’ll have to buy the mag for the full one or wait a few months until I can put it up here.

(Image: Stefan Sagmeister – Designs for True Majority who are trying to cut 15% of the Pentagon budget and move that money over to education.)

Omnium, the research group that I am part of (now online) in Australia, has just launched its next ‘Creative Waves’ global e-learning project ‘Visualising Issues of Pharmacy’.

The ‘VIP’ project is the first fully online international education initiative designed to link students and teachers in pharmacy and Graphic Design departments from universities and colleges around the world, and will challenge a diverse body of students and educators to address important global health issues that are of critical concern in Kenya. These include malaria, tuberculosis, immunisation and sexually transmitted diseases.

I’ll be taking part in this one too and it’s great to see some of the philosophy behind the Omnium Creative Network coming together with the educational aspect of Omnium. The details are below:

April – June 2007

More info and sign up on the Creative Waves website.

A few months ago I spent a very fun couple of weeks doing some work for the folks over at Poke where my friend (and ex-Antiromer) Nik Roope is one of the partners. I was directing (though it was a collaborative effort) the video for the Yahoo! Mail Championships microsite as well as doing some of the compositing. It has finally gone live so I can write about.

The basic premise is that Poke really don’t do Nike Pro style sites, not because they can’t but because, well, we all think they’re totally overblown examples of ad guys ‘doing web’. Now that Flash actually handles video well, it’s their dream come true – the ad folks can make shiny videos again.

The Yahoo! Mail Championships was a great chance to make a spoof of one of these and do it really well. The games are very addictive and really communicate the product well and we spent a lot of time with the characters and the shoot, and then making them look completely radioactive purple. The sarcasm of the copy was toned down a little by the end, which is a shame. Iain and a few others wrote some real gems.

I still think it’s pretty amusing though and it was nice to get back into a studio and do a shoot instead of being stuck behind a keyboard all day. Also good to know those studio and After Effects skills weren’t too rusty after all.