Data Portraits Sketches
Last Update: January 2006		  
   





Sketch 3 (Spatial Portraiture: Space as Content and Medium):

After various explorations with space, this sketch shows how one can build a medium to depict a person's relation to a physical environment.

One of the main challenge is to be able capture the spatiality of the outside world in a graphical environment. We live in space and that shapes our personality, but when we want to represent this spatiality we need a more spatial medium that lends itself to different configurations.

This particular one is a portrait of a woman through her trip to Iceland last year. I use images, audio clips and a three-dimensional landscape where a viewer can walkthrough and listen the audio associated with the images.

The environment is not algorithmically generated like the other sketches. It is crafted much more like a portrait. Although the images were chosen by the subject, I designed the environment (e.g. the geometry, image processing, linking the audio files...etc.) based on my perception of the subject. The space in responsive; different audio clips play based on how many times you pass the same grounds.

At this point, I started to look more closely to:
- Psychological Maps,
- The relationship between memory, database, narrative and archive (Lev Manovitch's arguments),
- Framing and embodiment in portraiture.

It also seems to me that this piece has a lot of inspiration from Chris Marker's visual essay style.

In terms of its relation to the previous sketches, you can see this one as a close-up to one of the circles in sketch 2.

This page has stills from a walkthrough in the environment: sketch 3.

See hi-res images for sketch 3.

You can also see a video of the environment :
big (760 x 480 ~ 100 mb)
small (320 x 240 ~ 30 mb)

  
   
Sketch 1 (Temporal Distribution):

This is an initial foray into understanding the perception of time in sociable media. I am using phone call logs (which provide the place, call time and duration information) for three different users to capture their communication activity in a period of three months from July 2005 to September 2005.

The main objective at the first sketch is to see the rythm of the data (more precisely, when did which place is called and how long was the conversation) in time, and understand if this information can provide any clues about what kind of a relatioship the user forms with the distant one.

I am assuming that In every single call to the same place, one can interpret a sense of proximal closure and a personal significance attributed to the place.

The two main aspects of this sketch is to make use of the circular notion of time (such as one day, week or month) and the use of images as a kind of visual memory recalling these places.

Two different colors represent two different users.

More images for sketch1.
Sketch 2 (Spatial Distribution):

As a second attempt, I wanted to shift my focus from the temporal dimension to a spatial distribution to reflect more on the scale-importance relationship of the places to users. The graphic shows the representation of the cities for each user based on how many times they were called and the total amount of time spent on during the conversations.

I also changed the way I use images. Mainly each place is now represented with a stream of images(sequence of frames) associated to the place. Although the phone call information currently does not come with any image data, the overall study take into account the possibility of using more audio-visual information (i. e. images captured via the cell phone, or the recording of the calls themselves) to portray a variety of relations in these portraits. For the time being, the photographs are retrieved from Flickr.

Varios images for sketch2.

See hi-res images for sketch 2.

This design is exhibited at InfoVis Art Show in 2006. See video (~60MB).