A Flitting Atlas of the Human Gaze

by admin | Apr 26, 2019

A Flitting Atlas of the Human Gaze

When the Harvard Art Museums collection looks back at us, which direction does it look? Up, down, left, or right? How deeply or shallowly does it cast its gaze? Do most images peer straight into the visitor’s eyes? What is the orientation of the subject’s head, frontal or rotated? Do particular media or cultural traditions correlate with preferences regarding the directionality of the human gaze? The installation is built upon the AI-based extraction and analysis, fine-tuned via human supervision, of pairs of eyes from the Harvard Art Museum painting, print, sculpture, and coin collections. It allows the visitor, equipped with an input device, to explore the collections from the standpoint of the depicted subject’s gaze direction. A red dot appears where the input device is pointed towards the wall of monitors, establishing a focal point, a point of convergence around which arrays of images are summoned. For centuries visitors have navigated collections on the basis of culture, chronology, genre, and medium; to those conventional forms of exploration, A Flitting Atlas of the Human Gaze adds a new mode based on the distribution of looks across media and time.

A collaboration between Kevin Brewster, Todd Linkner, Dietmar Offenhuber, Jeffrey Schnapp (in alphabetical order)

Link to the webversion of the project

Staubmarke (dustmark)

by admin | Oct 5, 2018

Staubmarke (dustmark)

Staubmarke is a public space installation for the Drehmoment Festival in Stuttgart – a city affected by airborne particulate matter pollution. Controversies between public health advocates, the city, and the local industry often manifest in disputes about proper methods of measurement and the veracity of citizen-collected data.

The project visualizes air pollution by calling attention to the patina on the city’s surfaces. The dustmarks are executed as reverse graffitis, making the accumulated pollution visible by partially removing it. By calling attention to dust as a material rather than an abstract value, the project contextualizes the sensor measurements with their physical basis.

Over the following months, the dustmarks will fade, as new dust will accumulate in the cleared areas of sign. Ultimately, the project is about the limits of objectivity – just as the dustmarks are no accurate representation of pollution exposure, the quantitative metrics are subject to political debates and at the same time only able to capture a limited aspect of the complex phenomenon of particulate matter.

Project website: http://dust.zone

In collaboration with Luftdaten.info, thanks to Lara Roth, Jan Lutz, Michael Saup, Pierre-Jean Gueno, Annekatrin Baumann/HLRS, Fa. Diezel

Paper: Maps of Daesh

by admin | Jan 12, 2018

Paper: Maps of Daesh

The Cartographic Warfare Surrounding Insurgent Statehood

The ongoing Syrian civil war raises new cartographic challenges, including the ethical question of how the self-proclaimed Islamic State should be represented. States and news organizations face a conundrum: by mapping IS territory, they implicitly acknowledge its statehood. I investigate how different mapping methods carry different connotations for representing the strength and nature of the terror state, arguing that the statehood the IS is symbolically contested through cartographic choices that reflect the diverging interests of map makers.

Based on a comparative study, this article investigates the visual languages of IS sanctuary maps as published by news agencies, intelligence agencies, or circulated by the insurgents themselves. I argue that the statehood of territory held by the IS is symbolically contested through cartographic choices that reflect the diverging interests of the map makers. Beyond official representations, the article also considers the maps created by amateur conflict mappers and visual forensics experts, who extract and cross-reference information from social media including posted cell phone and drone footage, georeferenced tweets, and satellite images. I argue that the novel visual strategies developed by these practitioners for presenting visual evidence emphasize nonrepresentational aspects of cartography and represent a countermodel to established cartographic languages that follows an indexical rather than iconic or symbolic paradigm.

Link Pdf Link to the Map Archive

Pdf with original figures from the paper

Tracings of original images by Azam Majooni

Art of the March Boston

by admin | Apr 7, 2017

Art of the March Boston

Just-In-Time preservation and documentation of 6000 protest signs of the Women’s march protest that took place on Jan. 21, shortly after President Trump’s inauguration. After the event, protestors arranged their signs along the fence of the old graveyard at the Boston Common. Struck by this ephemeral monument, a group of colleagues including Nathan Felde, Alessandra Renzi, Lucas Freeman, Alifa Rachmadia and myself spontaneously arranged for a collection of the signs after we learned that they were bound for disposal. With the help of volunteers, we collected, stored, sorted, classified and digitized every individual sign, which is currently the only complete collection of protest signs covering a major event.

Credits: Initiated by Alessandra Renzi, Nathan Felde, Dietmar Offenhuber. Visualizations & Web: Siqi Zhu, Navarjun Grewal, Christopher Pietsch, Colleen Curtis

Press coverage:

Zamudio-Suaréz, Fernanda. 2017. “In Discarded Women’s March Signs, Professors Saw a Chance to Save History.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 24.
Fleming, Nicole. 2017. “Volunteers Begin to Sort through Signs from Women’s March.” The Boston Globe, April
DeRuy, Emily. 2017. “Boston’s New Accidental Archive of Protest Posters.” CityLab. January 26.
DeRuy, Emily. 2017. “What Happens to Those Posters From the Women’s Marches.” The Atlantic. January 25.
Annear, Steve. 2017. “Professors Stash Boston Women’s March Rally Signs to Preserve a Piece of History.” The Boston Globe, January 23.

Visit Art of the March Website

Video by Emily Gordon, Ellie Lacourt, Connor Lewis.

Urban Radiance

by admin | Aug 31, 2016

Urban Radiance

A visual companion for the essay “Sticky data – context and friction in the use of urban data proxies.” published in Data and the City. ed. Rob Kitchin, Tracey P. Lauriault, and Gavin McArdlel. New York: Routledge. [pdf]

What have global data sets that estimate population density, economic productivity, measles outbreaks, rural poverty, resource footprints and electrification rates, urbanization and suburbanization, or average wages in common? They are all based on nighttime imagery of city lights captured by the Operational Line Scanner (OLS) sensor on the satellites from the US Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP).

What should later become the workhorse of geographers and economists was initially a completely accidental by-product: of a cold-war era military satellite program—launched in the 1950s by the US Air Force for estimating cloud cover and precipitation for reconnaissance missions. Army engineers discovered that the sensors were sensitive enough to capture the artificial radiance of cities during moonless nights without cloud cover.

In 1978, Thomas A. Croft published the first global composite of night-time images in the Scientific American. At that time, the image data had to be manually stitched together from analog films ejected in capsules from the satellite, which had to be laboriously recovered by the military. Today, the Black Marble data set has become one of the most popular motifs of space imagery.

While DPMS images are usually used to show regional differences, this project visualizes the temporal change in urban radiance from 1992 until 2015. It is the first interactive visualization of radiance time series data.

Link to project