Ryan MacMillan

I caught up with Marc Johnson during the week and we had a chat about data planners being the new creatives. Out of this came a number of ideas, but I’ll start by sharing a few interetsing examples and lets see where it winds up.

An example I’ve used a few times is a piece by a fellow Brisganistahn refugee, Natalie Jerimijenko at the Bureau of Inverse Technology. BIT specilises in renedering information intelligible by juxtaposing it in surprising ways. My favorite amongst many is the Despondency Index which tracks the number of jumpers from the Golden Gate Bridge, tracked against the Dow Jones.

Marc’s brought up Swivel a site that allows users to upload and display different data sets, present them in different formats and tellingly - add ‘Bling’ a feature which lets the user inmport a background image from Flickr to pimp their chart. Swivel is also interesting for the sheer volume of data that it is attracting, cited by Techcrunch as ‘the de-facto depository for official OECD data’.

And then there are all of the lovely visulaisations that are working to make the connections on the social web intelligible; Mat Morrison is playing with some of them here. 

Henry also mailed our ex-Agency list with some sweet examples including 

• NEC’s Ecotonoha 
• And these dendograms from Amber Frid-Jimenez at MIT’s Media Lab

Researching this brought me to the wonderful Infosthetics with the perfectly architcetural tag line of “Form follows Data”

And if there was ever an example that acutely highlighted the political nature of art and data its this competition, Show Us A Better Way,  that is being run in the UK by the (ironically perhaps?) Orwellian Power of Information Taskforce (no I am not kidding) to generate new ideas for the use of public data.

When will we be seeing the Venice Data Biennale?