Storytelling with Digital Mapping

Ouchhh Creative New Media Agency works at the interface where meaning emerges from data and digital technologies.

In addition to the expected advertising, their work includes performance art created from 3D image tracking and mapping, and inspired by scientific and mathematical topics like light physics, geometry, neuroscience, and particle physics.

Their website includes many compelling projects, including these:

The Art of Exoplanets

"...Hurt and Pyle, who render vibrant visualizations based on data from Spitzer and other missions, are hybrids of sorts, blending expertise in both science and art. From squiggles on charts and columns of numbers, they conjure red, blue and green worlds, with half-frozen oceans or bubbling lava...Visualizations based on data can also inform science, leading to genuine scientific insights...For Hurt, the real goal of scientific illustration is to excite the public, engage them in the science, and provide a snapshot of scientific knowledge."

"We kind of cover each other's blind spots a bit"

"...art is as much a historical record of our changing understanding of the universe as the textbooks we write." -- Robert Hurt, IPAC Center

Read article here.

The Confluence Projects, Todd Gilens

Artist Todd Gilens works with Sagehen Creek Field Station outside of Truckee, CA and Reno, NV, and the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Lab (SNARL) near Mammoth Lakes, CA. His work there includes:

"...literature reviews, interviews and field work with researchers to understand the language, methods and motivations of stream science, as well as how streams are responding to climate changes."

Gilens has been working in the field and lab with invertebrate biologists David Herbst, Bruce Medhurst and Ian Bell, "considering how to bring aspects of their work to the average urban citizen".

A recent post from the artist's project newsletter illuminates some of the work emerging from that relationship.

From Gilen's crowd-funding website:

In my artworks, I borrow lecture halls, public transit vehicles, nursery propagation houses and other existing structures, adding images that make their meanings more legible. This new project emerged from visits to ecological field stations, where I compared my methods to those of field scientists’ and considered how both could inform our understanding of critical urban systems.  

“Confluence” will use the tops of urban curbs as a space to communicate with pedestrians about flowing water, stream science and the urbanization of landscapes. Using script fonts derived from local historical people’s handwriting, texts will be cut from bright yellow reflective traffic-marking tape and laid down along a mile of curbs, zigzagging from block to block on routes that follow the street grid overlay of former stream channels.

Turning graphical data into artworks

From Fred Swanson:

Artist Jill Pelto "creates paintings based on graphs of data on the environmental effects of climate change."

Read article here.