A sample of the teeny-tiny delights on offer at the Journey To The Microcosmos channel – in this case a fascinating chapter called “Microbes Don’t Actually Look Like Anything’ wherein we learn that light and microscopy create visions of teeny-tiny life that don’t actually look like that in teeny-tiny reality.
Hey, it’s no biggie.
A ‘visual essay on the state of being connected’ by Martina Stiftinger and Rita Louro. To wit:
…a metaphorical study of interpersonal relationships and social constraints […] portrayed through a series of abstract analogies reflecting the essence of our everyday social interactions.
Fair enough.
Digital animations interpreting the trills, squads and coos of birds recorded during a visit to the Amazonian jungle by Austalian artist Andy Thomas, who tells Colossal:
I am fascinated with the idea of generating digital art that references the beauty and complexity of nature. I hope this piece will encourage people to research the many amazing varieties of birds that call the Amazon home, and remind us of how fragile and important this place is to us all.
Previously by Andy Thomas: Eye Candy: Synthetic Nature
An increasingly chilling time-lapse visualisation of every COVID-19 death worldwide from January to June 2020 (Inspired by Isao Hashimoto’s “A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945”) created by James Beckwith, who admits a follow up may be necessary. To wit:
Each country is represented by a tone and an expanding blip on the map when a death from Covid-19 is recorded. Each day is 4 seconds long, and at the top of the screen is the date and a counter showing the total numbers of deaths. Every country that has had a fatality is included.
Needless to say, the cacophony builds relentlessly.
Off The Staff: visualisations of classical music (digitally generated using free music notation software Muse Score and Open Score) by ‘designer, data freak and fractal nut’ Nicholas Rougeux.
Above (from top): The Four Seasons: Winter, Antonio Vivaldi; William Tell Overture, Gioachino Rossini and Flight of the Bumblebee, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
In these circular sweeps, as if laid down by the minute hand of a clock, each instrument is represented by a different colour. Each dot represents a note in the score. Pitch is indicated by the distance from the centre of the image, while the time at which the note occurs is given by the angle from the 12 o’clock position. The size of the dot indicates the duration of the note.
Rougeux (who, rather adorably, can’t read sheet music) adapts the traditional representation of scale, telling MyModernMet:
I did away with that and showed all notes in their natural position on the scale—distance from center—no matter how high (farther) or low (closer) they were. Essentially, while sheet music shows notes from different scales on the same staff, my project shows different staffs on the same scale—hence the name, Off the Staff.
An average day in the life of Americans explored by interactive data visualisations.
EXPLORE HERE: A Day In The Life Of Americans (Flowing Data)
Sinéad Burke writes:
Thought you might be interested to see what’s going up on Hanover Quay. It’s a project sponsored by DCC and Codema and designed by new Irish architecture practice de Siún Scullion Architects. It’s literally five minutes of Irish oil use. The project intends to make visible what is normally much discussed, but rarely seen.
To wit:
As we are all well aware, non-renewables energy sources are finite and are being consumed at an alarming rate. The rate at which these resources are being depleted can be expressed in a number of ways (CO2 per annum, Exajoules per country, TWh per capita etc), most of which are too abstract or on too colossal a scale for us to comprehend.
5CUBE takes a single fuel source we can all relate to in terms of volume, cost, and rate of usage and physically demonstrates how much is exhausted within a very short period of time.
The architects calculated that 473 barrels of oil are consumed every five minutes in Ireland. That’s a cubed volume of 4.2m. The 5CUBE represents this volume as a black glass-clad cube.
MORE: 5Cube In The Docklands (Irish Architecture Foundation)
The ‘House Of Mamba’ – a full sized LED-enhanced basketball court developed by AKQA for the NIKE RISE basketball tour in China, using motion-tracking and reactive visualisations based on Kobe Bryant’s training regime.
Waveform visualisations of certain tunes by designer Alex of Truth Studio.
