Sub_scape is a series of projects by Australian artists Kate Richards and Sarah Waterson that explores the potential of (and for) noisy intersections between datasets, archives and maps to produce emergent and deeply reflective topologies that upend the desire they express for a controlled and instrumental ‘sense making’. In the original 2004  iteration produced for ISEA Baltic (held on a Baltic ferry) sub_scape took the form of a submarine periscope that allowed the user to explore a datascape synthesised from environmental datasets from the Australian Desert and the Baltic Sea. The aim of the work was to explore the isomorphic characteristics and relations between these two widely differing landscapes as similarly affecting/reflecting deeply inscribed  metaphysical, aesthetics, and political intensities. The second iteration of Sub_scape. sub_scapePROOF (2006) used the same periscope interface used in the previous iteration to synthesise a landscape of political and rhetorical sensemaking to explore the relations between truth, discourse and affect. The third and final interation of sub_scape, subscapeCYCLE, used a recumbant cycle as the interface for navigating a virtual landscape terraformed in real-time by data mapping ‘contemporary, technological, economic and cultural ills – some pre-cached some streaming in real-time from the web.’ In this iteration of the project the user navigates a landscape deformed (and deforming) by manifestation of human folly, idealism and agency. The user’s interaction actually reforms this twisted topology so that the input of energy, the user’s very attention, becomes the basis for a sustainable ecology.

STARS  is a web app that brings together a number of ‘semantic web’ tools and interesting audio visual datasets in order to benchtest the potential for developing an open ended space for annotating audio visual material. That said the assets STARs is capable of working with extend well beyond the audio visual.

While STARS seems particularly well suited and uniquely capable for the collaborative annotation of rich media – the possibilites it presents extend well beyond this single facility. The real value of STARS lies in the model it presents for collaboratively mapping and actively developing a dynamic space of richly connected and widely varied assets – rich media, institutions, people, concepts, projects, events, text, taxonomies and folksonomies (annotations).

STARS allows a user to search any of the prescribed datasets via keyword or specified filter. It returns results identified by a neat icon key that identifies them by those varied asset types. The search provides a brief description, an option to reveal an detail description and semantic components, and an option to open a ‘mapping’ of the item.

Opening the map reveals a visualisation of the items semantic connections in a number of varied diagrams (linear, cubic, distrubuted). In each case the map provides an interesting description of the relation between associated asset types. The most obvious example might be a map centered on an institution that has a number of people attached – has links to other institutions through projects –  etc. These maps all open onto semantic descriptions which can be further annotated. I imagine these maps getting much more interesting when video annotations start mapping memes or technical qualities throughout a dataset. The great thing about STARs is that it has kept the annotations, assets and so on on the same level as assets of the order of institution and people. A completely flat ontology like this is incredibly powerful – infinitely generative – because it refrains from prescribing a hierarchy or limit the way things, bodies, concepts, assemblages potentially interact – In fact these very interactions become assets in the database – no longer ‘meta’ – they’ve become differential.

For instance with a system like this it becomes plausible that you might  realise oblique connections between otherwise disparate researchers via the way their varied taxonomies are applied in a set of like media annotations.

In February 2006, one of Gapminder’s founders Hans Rosling gave a TED talk that demonstrated the most effective aspect of Gapminder’s data visualisation, that is, how data changes over time. In a graph that displayed UN statistics of the number of children per family juxtaposed with life expectancy for a number of countries, Rosling takes us through the changes from 1962 to 2003 like a sportscaster calling a horse race as countries represented by animated, colour-coded dots that grow and shrink as they move across the axes.

The Gapminder site offers both static and dynamic materials in the form of PDFs and clickable flash presentations/applications, but the main draw is Gapminder World, where you can create your own animated data-visualisation by investigating whichever countries and using whatever parameters that interest you.

Packet Garden is a private virtual world generated by capturing information about how you use the internet. The open source software was created by the New Zealand-born, Berlin-based artist Julian Oliver. The software was commissioned by the Bristol-based contemporary arts centre, Arnolfini.

The software creates a landscape and grows virtual plants based on the servers you visit and the amount and kind of data you send and recieve. The information you harvest is entirely private and it is suggested that “you can think of packet gardens as pages from a network diary.”

The ART Mobile Lab, for instance, is known for its work on locative media in wilderness areas, while the Collaboration and Visualization Lab is known for its hybrid research practice and is dedicated to “the design of new technologies, applications, and experiences for cultural interfacing. That is, interfaces that encourage shifts in the perception of the self and the everyday lived world through collaborative experiences in spaces where we play, work, and learn.”

As the user goes about their day, the bio sensors capture real-time information on their physical states, including pulse, movement, skin temperature and galvanic skin response. At the end of the day, when the user syncs the collection devices to the tablet, the software interprets the bio data and represents the user’s emotional and physical states as colourful body shapes in positions ranging from fully reclined to upright. The colour of the shapes represent emotional states, with blue for the calm/rested end of the scale, red for the other aroused/agitated extreme, and gradations of purple for the states in between. Whether the shapes are more horizontal or vertical indicates that the user is moving around a lot or a little, respectively. Text messages that the user has received throughout the day, and photos they have taken are also uploaded to the diary from their mobile phone. All this bio and social data is then overlaid on a timeline of the user’s day.

The user can then navigate their diary by scrolling through this timeline and looking at sections of their day and the data associated with it. Photos they have taken are displayed in stacks according to their timestamp, and circular symbols that represent text messages received can be clicked on to reveal their contents. The user also has the ability to write or draw on these sections – perhaps notes on where they were, who they were talking to – adding another layer of narrative.

High-res screen captures can be viewed here and there is a video with more information on how to use the system here.

Affective Diary was developed in the Interaction Lab at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) in cooperation with Microsoft Research. Participants in the project are: Kristina Höök, Martin Svensson, Anna Ståhl, Petra Sundström and Jarmo Laaksolathi, SICS, Marco Combetto, Alex Taylor and Richard Harper.

Interactive Media Facades (Rob Saunders, Martin Tomitsch, Design Lab)

The Design Lab is a centre for research and creative practice in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. It aims to “foster design as a means of knowledge production in its own right.” The centre’s research staff and postgraduate students come from a range of disciplines including interaction design, electronic arts, computer science and social science.

His research blog  infosthetics.com collects data visualizations and similar projects related to his interest in Information Aesthetics. It takes it’s name from Lev Manovich’s definition of information aesthetics.