Physical visualization

Mount Fear Statistics for Crimes with Offensive Weapon South London 2001-2002 (2002) corrugated cardboard 2.3m x 1.85m x height 1.85m

After tactile videos or high touch visual, data visualization becomes sculpted and physical. Artist Abigail Reynolds works with materials to bring fugitive knowledge and connections into the immediacy of physical experience.


130 layers of 10mm polystyrene with sprayed finish

In this work, she generates data sets relating to the frequency and position of urban crimes. Each individual incident adds to the height of the model, forming a mountainous terrain.


MOUNT FEAR Statistics for Violent offences 2001-02 Central Manchester (2003) Scale: 1:22,000 (1cm:22m) Relief: 1:24 (1 layer represents 24 offences per km2) Fits a 4x8ft x 70cm plinth. Height 203cm (including plinth)

The imaginative fantasy space seemingly proposed by the sculpture is subverted by the hard facts and logic of the criteria that shape it. The object does not describe an ideal other-worldly space separated from lived reality, but conversely describes in relentless detail the actuality of life on the city streets.

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
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Digital marks

A little bit on digital marks, I selected a variety of them.

The semacode, a two dimensional code that encodes a URL. The picture below is the semacode of architectradure. Thank you Michael Surtees for the link! This tag embed the URL address of my blog, that can be read by your cell phone and send you to its page. I guess it avoids typing in the URL and you can rapidly go through a series of web sites using the respective tags.


semacode of architectradure

It is especially useful for combining physical space to digital content. The Semacode's Software Development Kit has is developed for ubiquitous computing by creating visual tags for objects and contexts, and read them using a mobile camera phone. The physical Wikipedia called Semapedia , created by Alexis Rondeau and Stan Wiechers, allows you to add place tags on places and things to link them to the relevant Wikipedia articles.


trash can with a wikipedia tag

Semacode technical paper

Urban tapestries allows public mapping and sharing by combining mobile and internet technologies with geographic information systems. This system was linked to Natalie Jeremijenko's famous feral robots -open source robots for investigating contaminated urban sites- and called Robotic Feral Public Authoring: "Adding the sensor readings to online mapping tools, such as Urban Tapestries, suddenly brings the relationships between environment and home vividly to life. It enables people to feel they can learn about their environment and have the evidence to do something about it"

Yellow Arrow allows a community to tag places using arrows. You can post a message using the arrow and anyone could retrieve it using their cell phone. Another method to link digital content to a physical place. The community of yellow arrow is quite big. Their blog.



Elens allows anyone to create talking landmarks. Developed by the MIT Media Lab it allows anyone to tag a place by adding a sticker on a physical location, sticker that can later be scanned by a cell phone, in this case the Motorola A1000.

M-views developed at the MIT media lab in the interactive cinema group -media fabrics- with Glorianna Davenport, explores the "ideas, methods, and culture of mobile cinema, which is experienced in temporal and spatial narrative segments that can be delivered on context-aware mobile devices."

In 2002, I researched with Glorianna Davenport on technologies to allow digital information to communicate with the physical space. I worked on Passing Glances a system that enables users to create ambient urban interludes through the use of SMS text messages. Associated graphics and storytelling were projected in the urban space.
CHI'04 paper
Enarrative5 2003 paper

With these tags, the physical space is tagged to the digital space. One can think the other way around and tag the virtual space with physical content. That is what Josh Lifton told me he was working on the other day. Josh created a plug sensor/actuator network, called the dual reality lab, that links the MIT Media Laboratory space to a virtual lab space in the Second Life online virtual world.


Location of the MIT Media Laboratory in Second Life

More info technical about the plug

Digital technologies make us re-evaluate the physical world

For my PhD I research on how digital technologies make us re-evaluate the physical world. We perceive a new physicality through digital materials. This modification of our perception of the environment is developed through our experience with the digital. I am creating products that reflect this digital influence that I will post soon on the blog.

I am designing Jewelry in the form of arial patterns of a city. My vision is to have in miniature the multitude of patterns that one can see from a distance. The research implication/discussion is now that we constantly travel by plane, use GIS, google map, satellite imagery, our vision is expanded. We now consider differently objects, we have a different representation to them. As much as the car has influenced painting and the representation of space and movement, I want to show how the use of new technologies can change our way to design objects.

Today I found on Idealist an interesting related product to my research, and to a certain extent art work, The palm-size Tersumus eraser. This eraser made by artlebedev borrows its shape from the well-known key on a computer keyboard.