#aaronkoblin

Flight Patterns, Aaron Koblin, 2011, Art Institute of Chicago: Architecture and Design

Flight Patterns is a time-lapse animation that employs data visualization and processing, an open-source computer programming environment, in order to display American air-traffic patterns and densities over a twenty-four-hour period. Begun as a larger project at UCLA with designers Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne, Aaron Koblin’s animations follow the routes of 140,000 airplanes crossing the United States beginning at 5:00 p.m. Eastern time. Koblin uses variations of color and pattern to illustrate a wide range of data and events, including aircraft type, alterations to routes, changes in flight traffic over certain geographical areas, weather systems, and no-fly zones. As the animation reveals multiple iterations of flight patterns during the cycle, the viewer experiences a changing, phantom geography of the country with airline hubs appearing as bright points of diffusion within a complex web. Funds provided by the Architecture & Design Society Size: N/A Medium: Animation

Flight Patterns, Aaron Koblin, 2011, Art Institute of Chicago: Architecture and Design

Flight Patterns is a time-lapse animation that employs data visualization and processing, an open-source computer programming environment, in order to display American air-traffic patterns and densities over a twenty-four-hour period. Begun as a larger project at UCLA with designers Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne, Aaron Koblin’s animations follow the routes of 140,000 airplanes crossing the United States beginning at 5:00 p.m. Eastern time. Koblin uses variations of color and pattern to illustrate a wide range of data and events, including aircraft type, alterations to routes, changes in flight traffic over certain geographical areas, weather systems, and no-fly zones. As the animation reveals multiple iterations of flight patterns during the cycle, the viewer experiences a changing, phantom geography of the country with airline hubs appearing as bright points of diffusion within a complex web. Funds provided by the Architecture & Design Society Size: N/A Medium: Animation

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Amsterdam SMS messages on New Years Eve

SMS visualization tool looking at the city of Amsterdam on New Years Eve. Data from KPN Telcom.

Project with MIT Senseable City Lab and Current City.

This work was originally developed as a series of experiments for the project "Celestial Mechanics" by colleagues Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne at UCLA. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited  with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.

For this blog, I researched an art piece by Aaron Koblin called “The Single Lane Superhighway.” This piece displays a line (the road) with different cars travelling across the screen continuously. For this project, Progressive commissioned artists over 30 years to “interpret annual report themes important to the company’s values.” Aaron Koblin helped to bring the artistry alive in an interactive and fun way. Koblin then asked his viewers to contribute their own artwork of each car to create a connection with their automobile. Each car can be clicked on and it shows the drawing that someone else did, his or her name and age. There are 50,000 cars that continuously drive past the screen, all different. A simple browser based drawing tool was used to create this piece. A loop must have been used of some sort to make the cars continuously move across the screen. In terms what kind of art piece this is, I would say the meaning and message is a little more important than how it actually looks, making it a bit conceptual. However, the piece is clean and nice to look at, but I found I got bored of clicking the pictures to see someone else’s drawing of the car. So I assume that the 30 years put into this project makes it the most important aspect of this art piece. Otherwise, as a user, I find it to be a bit monotonous. It is cool to be able to click each car and watch the step-by-step drawing process the additional artist took to recreating the car. It’s definitely an interesting piece and I also love how every car is different and interesting. Some are backwards, while others have flowers for wheels. The names of each car also bring the car to life. One car might be titled “I’m so bad at this” or another “lol.” When reading the titles and looking at the car, I can definitely get a sense of the person drawing it because I know I might title my ugly car that as well. Overall, I chuckled at some of the drawings and corresponding titles and found this piece to be enjoyable.

Flight Patterns - Color

by Aaron Koblin

24 hours of flight data.

Aircraft colored by type.