Aaron Koblin Comes To USC From Google
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Aaron Koblin (Daily Trojan)
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Aaron claims to turn data into art – a fascinating new approach to data which he demonstrates very artistically in all his projects. He defines Data Art as the way in which humanity and culture is enhanced by technology. According to him, data art is a representation, simulation and interconnection of data.
He started out with his first Data Art project while studying at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He gave a visible form to the flight data across USA, without any context to the data representation. There was no map to support the data that was being displayed and yet, one could see where the east coast and the west coast was due to the major airport locations. As the data representation changed over time, one could make out what time of the day it was – when the east coast wakes up and all the flights rush out.
Taking this concept forward, he worked on another project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in which he mapped the communication traffic from New York to the other cities in the world. Then, he went on to map the SMS messages outflow in Amsterdam a map of the city over the course of a year. He also worked with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on a installing a data art display on the San Jose International Airport, which shows the weather conditions in different cities in the world, predicts the cloud formations for that weather and generates that on the display.
He discussed his personal projects and talked about how all of them were inspired by the idea of working together and the concept of mechanical turk. His first project, The Sheep Market, included asking 10,000 people to draw a sheep facing to the left for which he provided a 2cent incentive and then he later sold off flocks of 20 sheep for 20 dollars. He said that he wanted to test how people would react to being told to do a certain thing without knowing the context of why they are doing it. More projects in the same direction were tenthousandcents.com and bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com. He stated that he found that people with no context were more expert than experts themselves (the concept of mechanical turk).
Read more: Arcade Fire's Interactive Music Video, Aaron Koblin's Work
One of his most famous projects is The Johnny Cash Project – a project to involve thousands of people to contribute to the last music video for Johnny Cash as a tribute to the great man. Koblin also talked about how he believes that new media imitates the past and how he hopes to explore the creative potential of connected digital technology.
His work at Google includes using data visualization tools like datgui, Tailbone and ThruJS. Some of his projects include chromexperiments – a website for demonstrating the most innovating experiments on the web that do not find place anywhere else. He is also working on Web GL – the concept of jamming a PlayStation into a browser by providing the power of hardware to the browser.
He also briefly discussed his latest projects at Google, which are: Arcade Fire's Interactive 'Reflektor' Music Video and Station to Station. The former includes controlling a dancer in Haiti with your mobile phone – you can connect your phone to your computer, point your phone to the webcam and the webcam will track the phone and the accelerometer will track the rotation to make the dancer’s video imitate the motion of the phone.
To conclude, he said that the take away from the talk was that interface is a powerful narrative device. He believes in collaboration in art. He said that through his projects he has learnt about the creativity of people, how people want to be treated and that the more you constraint the creativity of people, the more they push against the boundaries.
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