Below is a more or less complete list. In summary, the arguments are roughly as follows:

• “Screensavers are outdated / unnecessary.” Well, yes. But that has never meant much in terms of deciding whether a cultural phenomenom succeeds or is banished to the Wasteland of Forgotten Memes. Tamagotchis or animated GIFs, anyone? 90% of all iPhone / Android apps are unnecessary for everyday living, yet the smartphone app culture is a runaway train.
• “Developing screensavers is currently way too hard.” I share this sentiment and suspect it to the main culprit along with its corollary: “Installing screensavers is too hard / scary / likely to mess with the rest of my computer.”
• “It’s impossible to improve on flying toasters.” This terrifying thought is exactly why I would suggest screensavers need revisiting.

In conclusion: Between being tricky to develop and just as tricky to install and successfully use, screensavers stand no chance of recovering ground as a cultural phenomenom. Despite their close link to the app culture that is currently dominating our lives, screensavers (aka “ambient software”) will get no love.

This might not seem like such a terrible loss, but I still posit that ambient data gadgets with possible integration to web / mobile apps would’ve been a great usage scenario. There are some ways this could still happen:

• Microsoft and Apple realize the lost potential and relaunch their screensaver frameworks complete with app stores for screensavers. (Unlikely.)
• Google develops a screensaver mode for Chrome as part of their Chrome apps initiative and allows sales of screensavers through the Chrome app store. (Entirely possible if a little optimistic. My favorite option by far, though. Google, are you listening?)
• In both these scenarios, new screensavers would be based on HTML5 with WebGL, allowing them to be cross-platform and based on open standards. Because you all understand that proprietary is stupid, right?

A sad footnote: I had to uninstall the brilliant Briblo screensaver after realizing it was interfering with the taskbar on Windows 7. So I’m back to the ever popular blank screen, like so much of the world population.

Update: After this was posted it got blogged on Creative Applications and I’ve received quite a few responses via Twitter. See the separate post “Screensaver Culture – Twitter responds” for a summary, as well as some further thoughts on the demise of the screensaver.

• Your task is to come up with a concept for a screensaver that is both suitable to the screensaver format and updated to a 2012 understanding of interaction design. We are looking for ideas that go beyond the traditional screensaver format, or which reinvent that format by applying design thinking to a field full of visual cliche.
• Two general directions are suggested (but not required):
  1. Ambient data gadgets – screensavers as data aggregators and visualizers.
  2. Computational graphics – parametric visuals.
• If your idea is too ambitious to realize in a 3-day time frame we want to see convincing screen mockups of how the screensaver would work. But we would rather see a real demo that’s rough around the edges than a slick Photoshop sketch. You must submit at least one Processing sketch illustrating part of your screensaver’s functionality.

• Yuji Adachi: Briblo – Lego style screensaver
• Twistori, visualization of tweets with certain keywords
• Smashing Magazine: Screensavers – Best Of (2007)
• Kuler Screensaver showing latest Adobe Kuler color palettes
• SETI @ Home distributed computing screensaver
• Scott Draves: Electric Sheep, massively distributed fractal image generator
• Twingly, blogosphere visualization
• Terence M. Welsh (Really Slick) – OpenGL 3D screensavers
• Stefan Trifan: Weather, City
• GeocodEarth, Flickr, GeoRSS mashup

Sketches made with Wblut’s Hemesh library

This blog has been quiet for a while, due not to laziness but rather lack of time. Some random notes to let you know what I’ve been up to:

• I just set up a Tumblr blog to post more theory-related thoughts that don’t fit this blog so well. First post: Things I’ve learned from disagreeing about (Media) Art on the Internet
• I’m working on some new objects for 3D printing, experimenting with interfacing Modelbuilder to Wblut’s Hemesh library. I have some promising results so far, but actual print tests remain. I will try to post more about this later, specifically providing a class that acts as a bridge between my UGeometry objects and the HE_Mesh data structure. Interchange of mesh data is the biggest issue for 3D libraries right now, hopefully the upcoming PShape3D structure will facilitate this.
• The Modelbuilder lib is due for an upgrade, I’ll do this when Processing 2.0 is out for good.
• I had a great time doing a solo show in San Francisco this summer, as part of the SF Film Society’s Kinotek series, see documentation on Flickr: SFFS Kinotek – Automatic Writing. Thanks to Sean Uyehara and the others at SFFS, as well as the excellent people I met during my stay.
• The SF show featured the biggest collection of Makerbot objects to date – about 25 pieces: Form studies (Makerbot). As always my thanks go to the Makerbot clan for excellent support, at the craziest I had 6 Makerbots printing at once.

Form studies (Makerbot) at the Automatic Writing show

Ryoji Ikeda’s “The Transfinite” installation at the Park Avenue Armory.

If you’re fortunate enough to be in New York anytime between now and June 11, 2011 you should make every effort to see Ryoji Ikeda’s “The Transfinite” installation at the Park Avenue Armory. It’s a massive audiovisual experience in two parts which should convince the most sceptical of audiences that maybe this whole “new media” thing has something going for it after all.

Milton Glaser on the fear of failure

On the occasion of a recent graduate show students from Berghs School of Communication in Sweden have conducted a series of interviews with some very bright people about the fear of failure. Predictably, many responded with the old adage: “Embrace failure.”

While undoubtably true, that idea requires some translation in order to make into one’s personal practice and to most students it seems tremendously unhelpful. So Milton Glaser’s comments stand out by going far beyond simple encouragement. Instead he outlines an excellent argument for why the fear of failure leads to stagnation: If you only do what you’ve already proven to be good at, in the future you will always be asked to do that type of specialized service. As a result creative development ceases and rot sets in.

All creatives develop their own arsenal of tried-and-tested tricks. I’m certainly guilty of that. But I am always most impressed by people who take chances with their work and trust their instincts. I am also most pleased by my own projects when I feel they go beyond what I already know. So I for one think Mr.Glaser’s advice is damn good advice.

Make sure to watch the whole thing, it’s some of the most useful 7 minutes and 30 seconds you’ll spend this week…

Grid Distortion (2007-): Typology and density study

I’m working on a new 6-panel Grid Distortion piece for my Extrusion show next week, the final size will be 540 x 50 cm. I’ve been revisiting all the previous incarnations of the piece and tweaking the code to elicit new interpretations. Which led me to compile this summary of formal “typologies” that the piece is capable of exhibiting.

Given that the piece is essentially a variation on a very simple attractor simulation it tends to give very obvious (even almost boring) results, and its only through extensive tweaking of parameters and custom rendering styles that I’ve found results I’m excited by. Dave Bollinger made an accurate comment on Flickr that these are perhaps not very “watz-y” images, but its the translation of the form onto wood or metal that somehow completes the form for me.

Grid Distortion expanded: CircGrid on aluminum

Just last week I had some new aluminum pieces made in Berlin with Martin Bauer at Lasern in Berlin that represent a new direction in the series. Loosely titled CircGrid, these expand the same process to radially oriented grids. This might seem like an obvious extension, but the results are actually quite different. The images look less architectural, bringing to mind structures from nature like neurons, blood veins and plant roots etc.

I’m definitely enjoying this new and slightly more chaotic direction, as well as the crisp technical look of the aluminum.

Lecture notes – Information Visualization & Self-Ethnography course

I have uploaded the introductory lecture from Monday to Scribd, as seen above. The list of suggestions for possible data sources and comments on possible challenges are at the very end of the document. The visualization examples I used in the lecture are listed below.

In the section on self-ethnography I made rather heavy use of Nicholas Felton’s Feltron Report as a valuable reference. Please see his web site for more information on that project, you can even purchase hardcopies of the report for your own pleasure.

• Bill Cheswick: Internet Mapping Project
• Ben Fry: HapMap
• Martin Wattenberg: Shape of Song
• Moritz Stefaner: Map Your Moves
• SmartMoney.com: Map of the Market
• Marcos Weskamp: Newsmap
• Manuel Lima: Visual Complexity
• David McCandless: Billion-dollar-o-gram (see also his excellent TED Talk)
• OKCupid blog: Statistics from online dating
• Simon Elvins: Silent London

• Nicholas Felton: Feltron Annual Report
• RescueTime
• Drinkingdiary.com
• dailydiarycom
• last.fm
• Daytum
• your.flowingdata.com

Productivity charts generated by RescueTime.com tracker

The next two weeks I am teaching a workshop in Information Visualization and Self-Ethnography for the Interaction Design course at AHO. I’ll be posting links and resources here on the blog in the next few days.

Required Reading

• Gary Wolf: The Data-Driven Life (NYTimes.com)
• Shawn Allen: Introduction to Information Visualization course at SVA
• Wikipedia: Lifelog

Data collecting tools

• Daytum
• your.flowingdata
• RescueTime
• FourSquare
• Last.fm (music)
• MoodTracker (too medicine-specific?)
• EverNote
• Mindjet MindManager (commercial)

• Jim Campbell’s Formula for Computer Art
• Mork / Pendry / Stenslie / Watz: Sense:less (1996)
• Edward Ihnatowicz: Senster (1970) (YouTube)
• Edward Ihnatowicz: SAM – Sound Activated Mobile (1970) (YouTube)
• Jeffrey Shaw: Legible City (1989)
• Daniel Rozin: Interactive mirrors (1998-)
• Ken Rinaldo: Autopoiesis (2000)
• Chaos Computer Club: Blinkenlights (2001)
• Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin: Listening Post (YouTube) (2002)
• Golan Levin & Zachary Lieberman: Messa di Voce (2003)
• Golan Levin & Zachary Lieberman: Manual Input Sessions (2004)
• Golan Levin: Scrapple (2006)
• Scott Snibbe: Blow Up (2005)
• UVA: Volume (2006)
• Zachary Lieberman: Drawn (2006)
• Grafitti Research Lab: Throwies (Instructable) (2006)
• GRL & Theo Watzon: Laser Tag (2007)
• Zachary Lieberman, FAT and Grafitti Research Lab: Eyewriter (2009)
• Chris O’Shea / rAndom International: Audience (2008)
• Espen Sommer Eide: Karusell (2008)
• YesYesNo: Night Lights (video) (2010)

KBGAnimD01EB 0008, still from new sound visualization

Ever since doing Stockspace project it seems I am getting asked to do data-related work. This despite the fact that my personal interests diverge from such masters of insightful infographics as Martin Wattenberg, David McCandless or Jonathan Harris.

Suffice to say that I am more concerned with exploring data structures as spaces than I am with providing new understandings of the information contained within them. Manuel Lima’s Information Visualization Manifesto calls for a seriousness on the topic of data treatments, while my projects remain comfortably frivolous.

Recently I’ve been working on a project that has required researching data sources and adapting them to illustrate a bigger idea, which has led to much Googling in the absence of good data from the client. Sometimes you find the right thing immediately, but sometimes data is hard to find in a format that is freely available and easily parsable. Since I have found some good sources I thought I’d share them here…

• PVWATSS calculator from Renewable Resource Data Center (RReDC) provides theoretical calculations of yields (hour-by-hour, 365 days/yr) from photovoltaic solar panels for most international locations.
• World airport codes with geo name data, helpfully spidered by Wiebe Cazemier so you don’t have to.
• Unattributed FTP depository of geo-related CSV files, including postal and ZIP codes, world city info etc.
• Historical weather data from Weather Underground, providing year-by-year hourly information for most cities in the world. (See also this list of weather APIs.)
• Yahoo Finance offers downloads of historical stock price data (CSV) for just about any stock symbol out there. Sadly I have yet to find an open intraday stock data source, due to the proprietary nature of that kind of information.
• The Guardian’s Datablog is a recent venture, and I have yet to use any of the data sets they provide. But I like their approach, which is clearly aimed at democratizing data with a view to public agenda.

I would be interested in hearing tips about any great data sets out there, particularly interesting time series data.

Miska Knapek recently sent me a link to a source of weather sensor data from Helsinki, including measurements of wind direction at the top of Helsinki’s Olympic Tower in 5-minute intervals. He has already made some wind visualization videos and some fabricated wind data sculptures based on this data.