George Legrady

“behaviorism”: a framework for dynamic data visualization

While a number of information visualization software frameworks exist, creating new visualizations, especially those that involve novel visualization metaphors, interaction techniques, data analysis strategies, and specialized rendering algorithms, is still often a difficult process. To facilitate the creation of novel visualizations we present a new software framework, behaviorism, which provides a wide range of flexibility when working with dynamic information on visual, temporal, and ontological levels, but at the same time providing appropriate abstractions which allow developers to create prototypes quickly which can then easily be turned into robust systems. The core of the framework is a set of three interconnected graphs, each with associated operators: a scene graph for high-performance 3D rendering, a data graph for different layers of semantically-linked heterogeneous data, and a timing graph for sophisticated control of scheduling, interaction, and animation. In particular, the timing graph provides a unified system to add behaviors to both data and visual elements, as well as to the behaviors themselves. To evaluate the framework we look briefly at three different projects all of which required novel visualizations in different domains, and all of which worked with dynamic data in different ways: an interactive ecological simulation, an information art installation, and an information visualization technique.

Pockets Full of Memories: an interactive museum installation:

Conceived as an installation on the topic of the archive and memory, Pockets Full of Memories was exhibited on the main floor of the Centre Pompidou National Museum of Modern Art, Paris from 10 April to 3 September 2001. During this time, approximately 20,000 visitors came to view the installation and contributed over 3300 objects in their possession, digitally scanning and describing them. This information was stored in a database and organized by the Kohonen Self-Organizing Map algorithm [http://www.cis.hut.fi/teuvo/] that positioned objects of similar descriptions near each other in a two-dimensional map. The map of objects was projected in the gallery space and was also accessible online at [www.pocketsfullofmemories.com] where individuals in the gallery and at home could review the objects and add comments and stories to any of them.

Intersecting the Virtual and the Real: Space in Interactive Media Installations

Tracing is a two-sided screen projection installation contrasting two states of cultural differences in the Information Age. Texts and ambient sounds controlled through computers are continuously projected on both sides of the screen wall. One side provides factual data reflecting a cultural perspective on what it means to be a part of the technological culture. The other side of the wall shifts the narrative tone to express a position outside of the technocultural dominance to reveal a state of difference. The contents of both sides of the wall are affected by the audience’s movements and positions within the gallery space registered through a matrix of motion detection sensors.

Image, Language, and Belief in Synthesis

Toward noon he lay down for a nap. … On awakening, he thought that he saw an extraordinary mobile creature next to his face, an insect or mollusk which stirred in the shadow of his head. An almost terrifying power of life dwelt within that fragile thing. In less than an instant, and even before his vision could be formulated in thought, Zeno realized that what he was seeing was only his own eye reflected and enlarged by the glass, behind which the grass and sand formed a backing like that of a mirror.

Perspectives on Collaborative Research and Education in Media Arts

Digital arts is by nature a hybrid practice, integrating the poetics, aesthetics and conceptual strategies of art with the logical, systematic methods of technological processes from engineering and the sciences. This article reviews the development of interdisciplinary, collaborative arts-engineering research and education at the University of California at Santa Barbara, focusing on the Media Arts & Technology graduate program from a visual/spatial arts perspective.

Culture, Data and Algorithmic Organization

The author presents his interactive digital installations of the past decade, featured in museums, media arts festivals and galleries, that engage the audience to contribute data that is then transformed into content and visually projected large scale in the exhibition space. Collected over time, the data occasions further data-mining, algorithmic processing, with visualization of the results.

Swarm Vision

Swarm Vision is an installation consisting of multiple pan-tilt-zoom cameras on rails positioned above spectators in an exhibition space. Each camera behaves autonomously based on programmed rules of computer vision.

Data in Context: Conceptualizing Site-Specific Visualization Projects

Site-specific data visualization installations have distinct conditions of data collection, data analysis, audience interaction and data archiving. This article describes features of five data visualization projects related to their successful staging within different contexts.

Imagining Macondo: Interacting with García Márquez's Literary Landscape

Imagining Macondo is a public artwork that commemorates Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez. It was first showcased at the Bogota International Book Fair in April 2015 to an audience of more than 300,000 over the course of two weeks. The project involved extensive collaboration between an international team of artists, designers, and programmers. This article explores the historical and artistic contexts for the creation of the work, discusses the audience reception to the work, and describes the significant software and production requirements necessary to create an installation with thousands of participants and hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Creating coherent animations from video

In this paper, different techniques for the creation of time coherent figurative animations from a video input are presented. The animations are generated using an analysis-synthesis approach. Information of the scene is extracted using only a 2D RGB image. No markers or depth planes are needed. After the analysis, the image is drawn again using the extracted information. To guarantee temporal coherence when redrawing the image, different alternatives have been explored: matching and interpolation on the parameters domain and gradient descent parameter update. All methods and variations are described and illustrated with images.