My experience of London tomorrow will be somewhat “virtual,” as I spend a few hours on a layover at Heathrow. For a more artistic reinterpretation of the data that’s bound up with one of the world’s great cities, though, here’s a terrific installation:
LDN24 is a public art installation for the Museum of London. It draws filmic impressions and the facts and figures of London life into a picture of 24 hours in the life of the city.
The Light Surgeons – Production
FIELD – Data Visualisationmore info at field.io/project/ldn24
documentation by Saskia Schmidt, saskiaschmidt.com
The interactive mural recalls the crawl of a stock ticker, but there’s a generative fabric to the whole thing that attempts to build a narrative:
Statistics and statements from the web and a huge database are printed along the LED screen by the second hand of a 24 hours clock. Weather, traffic and news updates, the Thames’ tides, Tube updates and recent fire incidents are pulled live from numerous RSS feeds, Twitter and news portals.
A custom software composes statistics, the film and a generative soundtrack into an immersive audiovisual narrative. Each iteration reveals new connections between film and data, and puts the figures into context with everyday live.
More information:
http://www.field.io/project/ldn24#/1
And of course, nice to see a project built as a collaboration between visualists and artists specializing in data visualization. The description of the Field duo reads like a manifesto for how data visualization might become a refined practice of art and design,