generative

These images are from an experimental application for visualizing your friends on Facebook and their interconnections. Facebook allows applications to check whether one friend is friends with another friend. So I use this data to produce a chart that begins simply with you connected to each of your friends, and evolves as friends are connected with each other. Although the placement of people is initially arbitrary and random, the links between people tend to organize groups with multiple interconnections.

You can try it for yourself if you have a Facebook account. After loading the page, you should be redirected to Facebook to login and give permission to the application to find your friends. When you return to the application, it should begin drawing you and your immediate network. If it seems to stop without finding all of the connections, try pressing 'r'. To save a screenshot of the visualization, press 's'. You can drag people to add some organize to the layout.

The more friends you have, the slower it takes. If you have more than a few hundred, it'll get pretty crowded.

This is a Flash application that uses the Flare data visualization library. The friend relationships are modeled as a tree pattern and then presented using Flare's ForceDirectedLayout which subjects the data nodes to iterations of a physics simulation where nodes repel each other and the edges connecting them act as springs.

take a straight line, let it grow for a while.  then stop its' growth (actually here we start with three lines).  add a random number of lines to that line, at arbitrary spots on that line, each perpendicular to the first.  let them grow, apply the same process to the new lines as to the first.  repeat.  view the wonders of self/sub division. 

this image above uses this process.  instead of drawing lines, however, the program that created this image draws images of roads and neighborhood scenes from around the Twin Cities.  Each sucessive generation uses a different road: the first is interstate 94, the second highway 36.  The third generation uses an image of Franklin Ave in Minneapolis, and the fourth is 22nd Ave in Minneapolis.  The fifth generation ends the process, and instead of adding more lines, we add images of neighborhoods: baseball fields, construction zones, housing, parks, and industrial areas. 

The images were taken off of NASA's terra server, and they are representative of how our community is seen from a satellite in space, or, perhaps, an online mapping application.   The result, I hope, is pleasurable both as an abstract object with a seemingly natural shape, and also close up.  How new lines or roads or neighborhoods stack upon each other over time and intersect, merge, and overlap- we see this process over time in a city.  This work is an attempt to visualize, or perhaps, more accurately, conceptualize this process of change and growth.

you may view this image at its' highest resolution here.

you can view the growth from nothing to something of an image like this here.  the application is quite large (5mb) so please be patient.  also, there is much happening off the screen that you cannot see.  if you wait, the simulation will run.  it may take a couple of minutes to do its thing.  if you are lucky,  it will make your computer groan with extra processor cycles.  it is nice to watch roads beget roads beget roads beget ... and so on.

if you want to save the image, simply click somewhere in the screen, and then press your 'enter' key, and the image will be saved where ever you would like it to be on your file system.  you will then be able to see the parts of the image that were previously outside of your screen view.