My AzureOne View

Watch an Entire Day of Air Traffic in One Astonishing Visualization

BY KYLE VANHEMERT

03.14.14

Some 30,000 flights criss-cross Europe’s airspace on a typical summer day. In this video, you can watch them all in just under two minutes.

Air traffic is a frequent subject for visualization, but the folks at NATS, responsible for handling much of the air traffic control in Great Britain and elsewhere, know the delicate dance better than just about anyone. To give us a sense of what keeps them busy day to day, they put together this stunning video. Running at 1,440 times regular speed, the viz is striking as pure laser light spectacle. But the closer you watch, the more fascinating details you’ll find.

The clip combines UK radar data from June 21 of last year and flight plan data from the rest of the continent from July 28. To start, notice how planes come over from North America, not in one busy throng but instead in orderly rows, like they’re cruising in lanes on some great invisible highway. As we zoom in on England, we see some aircraft joining different thoroughfares to Europe’s big cities, as others split off on byways to destinations like Madrid and Lisbon.

In some of these closer views, we get a remarkable sense of the three-dimensionality of this complicated choreography. From a single vantage, we can see some planes circling low over Gatwick and Heathrow, their holding patterns materializing as arabesques of white light. Meanwhile, other aircraft shoot skyward, climbing toward cruising altitudes.

These perspectives, which show us planes not just as dots on a map but rather as objects in space, leave me yearning for an interactive version to pan and zoom around inside. In the meantime, as the search for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 presses on, this video is a nice reminder of how tremendously active our airways are every day.

From Wired.com

Into the black hole of the human soul in acrylic and ink.

Two years after his infinitely wonderfulillustrations for every page of Moby-Dick, which ranked among the best art and design books of 2011, self-taught Ohio-based artist Matt Kishreturns with an equally exquisite edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (public library). With one haunting acrylic-paint-and-ink illustration for every page, Kish — whose artwork was included in the excellent compendium The Graphic Canon, Vol. 3 — reinvigorates the Conrad classic and its timeless themes of race, gender, power, privilege, and the dualities of the human soul.

In the introduction, Kish contrasts his two projects:

Every illustrator, no matter what the project, is confronted with choices. In considering how to approach Heart of Darkness, I had to make a lot of choices, and they were never simple. What struck me while illustrating Moby-Dick was just how vast Melville’s novel seemed. It’s an enormous book that, to paraphrase Whitman, contains multitudes. It contradicts itself in style and tone in gloriously messy ways and it’s strong enough to carry the visions of dozens of artists. . . . With Melville, there is room.

Conrad is something entirely different, particularly when it comes to Heart of Darkness. There is a terrifying feeling of claustrophobia and a crushing singularity of purpose to the story. It’s almost as if the deeper one reads, the further down a tunnel one is dragged, all other options and paths dwindling and disappearing, until nothing is left but that awful and brutal encounter with Kurtz and the numbing horror of his ideas. Where Moby-Dick roams far and wide across both land and sea,Heart of Darkness moves in one direction only, and that is downward.

While it never could have been an easy task to take a well-known piece of literature and breathe some different kind of life into it with pictures, the inexorable downward pull of this black hole of a story — this bullet to the head — made demands that I couldn’t have imagined.

And yet Kish met those demands head-on, with equal parts creative bravery and respect for Conrad’s sensibility, all the while drawing us into that black hole with irresistible magnetism.