“Coming,” he shouted from the bathroom. He squeezed the last of his piss into the bowl and flushed. He looked in to the mirror, thought about his messy hair, splashed some water on his face, adjusted his shorts, flexed his bicep, and walked in to the living room.

The apartment was a small two bedroom. Melinda and Sophie had been living there for about six months. It was working out. They only had a few rules. Boys were only allowed to sleep over on weekends. No cigarettes only weed. And no Coldplay unless you have just been dumped.

“Music?” Josh asked. “Sure,” she said.  Josh opened her laptop that sat on the coffee table. He scrolled through thousands of songs. He put on this sad, indy acoustic guitar stuff, The Albert Wright Band. “Nice,” she said. She felt a little sad. She usually felt a little sad after having sex. They had morning sex. It was good. Not overly passionate, not restrained but fun, relaxed, enjoyable. She didn’t climax.

She had been seeing Josh for a few weeks now. This was the fourth time they had slept together. But it was the first time he had stayed at her place. She liked him. She liked him enough to want to get to know him more. It wasn’t one of those things where your world comes to a screeching halt and you throw yourself into somebody else’s life. That had only happened to her once before. When she was twenty five. Three years ago. She didn’t expect it to happen again. She was at the stage of life where you have to grind out these connections. When the disappointments and frustrations of your early twenties have created  protective barriers like mountains slowly built by a lava flow.

“Great coffee,” Josh piled some eggs on his toast. “Thanks, I get it at this place down the street. It’s expensive but everyone needs to splurge on something. Better this than shoes, cheaper,” she could her herself talking. She had that strange out of body sensation you get when you’re nervous. She thought she sounded stupid. “Yeah, I know what you mean,” he said with eggs in his mouth, “you have any ketchup?” She hated ketchup. Ketchup is the awkward silence of condiments, the thing you ask for when something is lacking. She got up and opened the fridge. The ketchup was on the shelf in the door. It was half empty. “Thanks,” he said and squirted it on his eggs. He was the type of guy who spread the ketchup over everything as apposed to making a little pile of it in the corner to dip. She didn’t like that.

“I had fun last night,” she said. “Yeah, me too. The band was great. I love that venue. Dark, sweaty, low ceilings, good shit,” he sipped his coffee. “It’s a cool place, good vibes,” she said. “I had fun this morning too,” he smiled at her and put one hand on her upper thigh. She put her hand on his. She smiled at him. She took a bite of her toast. “So, I just wanted to ask, to tell you, I mean talk about, this. Us,” she said.

He put is fork down and took a sip of his coffee. He pulled his hand off her leg and wrapped both hands around his coffee mug. He stared in to his eggs. “Yeah, we should,” he said. They sat there. Each one waiting for the other to say something. A few seconds passed. “I like you,” she said, “I want to keep getting to know you.” He looked up at her. “Me too,” he said and reached to brush the hair out of her eyes. She pressed her face into his large, strong hand; she closed her eyes. It felt warm against her cheek.

Download the source code.

The data provided below charts the world’s changing temperature since 1850. The figures, which are maintained by the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre, describe the temperature “anomaly” (the difference) between the year in question and the reference period of 1961–1990.

I’m not finished with the visualization yet but wanted to get some screen shots up while I continue to refine and iterate on the design. If you have any thoughts please share.

Once I’m finished with this I’ll post the Processing source code.

GLOW is an adventure with light and space. You are guided by glowing orbs that serve to be both your source of light and also your tools for solving puzzles. GLOW represents an inversion of a traditional level. The traditional level acts as a foundation to hide other entities such as traps and enemies while here the level it self is hidden and discovered through playing.

Download the design document here.

You can download the source code here.

You need to enter your own gmail info in the Authentication class. You need to download and install the ControlP5 GUI libaray. See here for instructions on how to install libraries in Processing

Let me know if you have any questions.

I was the lead on story and content development, writing and sound design for the project. I also assisted with game design, visual design, and production.

The simulation depicts a present-day reality and the same space in 2032. At the outset of the simulation the future is bleak; it represents the worst outcomes of the various scenarios. The player interacts with characters in both the present-day and the future. As they interact with them and learn their story they can influence their mindset as it relates to the environment and their world view. If the player makes the correct choices in the conversation puzzles then they incrementally improve the future ultimately shaping a better world.

The project is an attempt to humanize and personalize some of the abstract issues in this area and to help bridge the attitude behaviour gap that often exists with issues that reach far in to the future.

Here’s a short documentary about the making of Precipice:

The simulation was built in the game engine Unity leveraging traditional game design methodology and the research of the office.

The team at the Centre for Digital Media consists of artists, game designers, writers, and programmers.

Go here to download the game.

Data visualization sounds pretty dry. Mundane, technical, the stuff of economists and accountants. But that’s changed. Data is more accessible than ever. The US Federal government is releasing and publishing data in usable digital forms in an unprecedented fashion, the City of Vancouver and other municipalities around the world are doing the same. The keepers of the data are challenging constituents to do something with it. And the challenge has been taken up by many.

This week the specialist in the field of data visualization have gathered in Madrid for the 3rd annual Visualizer conference. With the goal of new ways to make data public and offer new tools to make this data meaningful.

Here’s a good look at some of the presentations at the conference from Information Aesthetic, one of the best blogs on the topic.

But the point here goes beyond a new trend and a powerful source of civic awareness. It’s about creating meaning, emotion, in a new way. In a way made possible by technology by a new medium. For example, a recent project by digital artist Todd Vanderlin, examines usage of the Boston Subway system.

Or another very well known project is Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns. Here Koblin took FAA data about flight routes over the US and visualized the patterns of movement over the course of a day. Again, using the most mundane information he created an emotive, informative, and compelling work.

Vancouver is home to one of the pioneers in the field, Jer Thorp. Jer, known by his online meme blprnt, is one of the masters at taking everyday things and building works of art out of them. A most compelling work in its conceptual simplicty and engaging aesthetic is GoodMorning. In it, Thorp visualizes entries from Twitter that contain the phrase “Good morning”. With this information he documents the evolution of a day in the Twitterverse using this simple data source.

In all these examples the creators, the artists, are taking very utilitarian subject matter which necessarilly compelling nor emotive and infusing it with new layers of expression. But with the data in the hands of an artist using tools like Processing and OpenFrameworks which make data visualization simple subway usage stats suddenly becomes fascinating.This is the power of art. Since the Cave of Altamira humans have been compelled to capture the everyday. To find meaning in the mundane, peel back the layers of routine, expresses the human spirit.

And that’s what we are witnessing here. Analyzing the archives of day to day human activity through an artistic lens changes the conversation. We can look at subway data or flight paths or when people say good morning on Twitter in a way that says more than the data alone. That’s the power and the beauty of art in a digital age, massive amounts of everyday information can be transformed into elegant works of art.

A great refernece for anyone looking to get started down the path of data visualization is Ben Fry’s book Visualizing Data. Fry is one of the creators of the programming language Processing. A programming environment I’ve been using for the past year.

My little place is scattered with pens but no words
I asked her to bring candles
To make the night glow
But she said it wasn’t necessary and got off the phone

I turned my back to the mountains

Looked at the city

Pulled on this stale cigarette

Grasped at these latches of being

I wished for everything to be different but for nothing to change

I coughed and threw the half burned memories over the balcony