If you’ve ever heard of Future Sonic or the words Open Source , then you probably already know about this chap and his work but its new to me and boggles my mind.
Aaron Koblin is based in San Francisco as an artist, designer and researcher; and he’s young – a bit of a cool arty techy nerd. He graduated from UCLA in 2006 and has been incredibly busy throughout and after his MFA in Design|Media Arts (evidence). His artistic focus is in data visualisation (“Data visualization is the study of the visual representation of data, defined as information which has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information.” Thanks wiki) As you can tell i am no expert in this field! Anyway, he has been working on data driven projects for years and creates visual artworks, videos and interactive media from varying sources of data, usually social and infrastructural, commenting on and analysing emergent cultural patterns and trends. The piece Flight Patterns, now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, takes aviation data and in the Processing programming environment, these paths from thousands of flights were plotted and visualised in a beautiful interactive web of colour and form.
His visual experiments and projects have led him to receive numerous awards and inclusion into many technology and innovation festivals and exhibitions; he was also awarded first place for Science Visualisation from the National Science Foundation.
This work is significant in a lot of different places through scientific research, art and commercial projects. One of his most recent and well-known ventures was his appointment as Director of Technology on the Radiohead/House of Cards project and music video. A piece which was groundbreaking for not being filmed at all but by being created purely out of data and code; producing a 3-D data video and launching an Open Source “music video without video” project with Google Code. AMAZING. This project and similar initiatives are encouraging artistic and mass participation in a way that I’ve not heard of before and its exciting. I am not overly into computers, I use adobe’s software for photography and graphics and enjoy the youtubes and the googles and the potential of a global digital voice, but in comparison to this area of creative technology my engagement with uptodate innovations is merely passive and some hardcore fans, scientists, researchers and artists might say none-existant. However, even after taking a brief look into Koblin’s world I feel awake, I feel inspired to learn about digital media’s potential but overall, I want to participate too.
Check out Aaron’s work and an interview with Casey Reas from Processing 1.0.
Aaron Koblin is also involved with San Francisco-based ‘Gray Area Foundation For the Arts- dedicated to building social consciousness through digital culture’. GAFFTA.org
