www.benfry.com
Ben Fry received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as Computer Science, Statistics, Graphic Design, and Data Visualization as a means for understanding complex data. After completing his thesis, he spent time developing tools for the visualization of genetic data as a postdoc with Eric Lander at the Eli & Edyth Broad Insitute of MIT & Harvard. With Casey Reas of UCLA, he currently develops Processing, an open source programming environment for teaching computational design and sketching interactive media software that won a Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica in 2005. In 2006, Fry received a New Media Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to support the project.
His work has shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2002 and the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial in 2003. Other pieces have appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria and in the films “Minority Report” and “The Hulk.” His information graphics have also illustrated articles for the journal Nature, New York Magazine, and Seed.
Fry is teaching a workshop in Processing in the Digital Media Program at Anderson Ranch from June 18th -22nd 2007.
Like any other game console, Atari 2600 cartridges contained executable code also commingled with data. This lists the code as columns of assembly language. Most of it is math or conditional statements (if x is true, go to y), so each time there's "go to" a curve is drawn from that point to its destination.
When a byte of data (as opposed to code) is found in the cartridge, it is shown as an orange row: a solid block for a "1" or a dot for a "0". The row is eight elements long, representing a whole byte. This usually means that the images can be seen in their entirety when a series of bytes are shown as rows. The images were often stored upside-down as a programming method.
Distellamap is a series of 13x19" prints where you can actually read the individual bits of text. Fry modified a version of distella to produce disassembled text output in the format that he wanted, and then used Processing to write a second program that creates the image of the output.
Valence is a set of software sketches about building representations that explore the structures and relationships inside very large sets of information.
The image on this page is taken from a visualization of the contents of the book "The Innocents Abroad" by Mark Twain. The program reads the book in a linear fashion, dynamically adding each word into three-dimensional space. The more frequently particular words are found, they make their way towards the outside (so that they can be more easily seen), subsequently pushing less commonly used words to the center. Each time two words are found adjacent in the text, they experience a force of attraction that moves them closer together in the visual model.
The result is a visualization that changes over time as it responds to the data being fed to it. Instead of less useful numeric information (i.e. how many times the word 'the' appeared), the piece provides a qualitative feel for the perturbations in the data, in this case being the different types of words and language being used throughout the book.
The premise is that the best way to understand a large body of information, whether it's a 200,000 word book, usage data from a web site, or financial transaction information between two multinational corporations, is to provide a feel for general trends and anomalies in the data, by providing a qualitative slice into how the information is structured. The most important imformation comes from providing context and setting up the interrelationships between elements of the data. If needed, one can later dig deeper to find out specifics, or further tweak the system to look at other types of parameters.