Category Archives: Art

Art, Deviant Cartography, Maps, Portfolio

2014 South Napa Earthquake – 3D Print

Two weeks ago on the night of August 24, 2014 I was shaken awake by the 6.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Napa, CA. It was the largest earthquake to hit the Bay Area since the 1989 World Series quake. Where I was in San Francisco wasn’t close enough to the epicenter to do much other than wake people up. But while watching the reports start coming in on Twitter it became clear that up in Napa there was quite a bit of damage. Unable to sleep, I started downloading the data to understand what the difference was between what I had felt and what it was like right in the epicenter.

Over the past couple weeks I’ve been experimenting with 3D printing the shake intensity from the Napa quake.

epicenter_angled

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Art, Data Visualization, Maps, Portfolio

A City Cut in Two by a Tornado

This is a map of Moore, Oklahoma. On May 20, 2013 an EF5 tornado struck this city of 58,000 people, killing 24 and injuring 377 others. The destruction within the direct path of the storm was near complete.

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This piece focuses on the city boundary of Moore and the destruction that ripped right through the center of the town. The tornado track has been removed from the map, and the city has been split open.

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Art, Maps

Point Nemo Wood Map

The most remote spot on Earth sits in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, over 1,600 miles from land in any direction. It is quite literally the middle of nowhere. And yet, because it’s exactly the middle of nowhere, it’s actually an incredibly remarkable somewhere. This beautifully unique spot is called Point Nemo.

point_nemo_wood_map1

This map brings focus to this distant pole of inaccessibility. Centered on Point Nemo we have a much simpler map than we’re used to. Instead of focusing on complex land features, we shift to look at the expanse of nothing. The islands closest to Point Nemo, Ducie Island, Motu Nui, and Maher Island, are marked and the 1,670 mile radius around the pole is delineated.

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Art, Maps, Portfolio

Haiti Earthquake Tree Trunk Map

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This piece is a representation of the January 2010 earthquake that destroyed much of Haiti. Laser cut out of different kinds of bamboo, it shows the shake intensity data radiating out from the epicenter near Port-au-Prince.

This devastating earthquake caused massive damage and an unknown number of deaths. Estimates were anywhere from about 80,000 to 300,000 casualties. Even this many years later it’s hard to know the full impact of this event. I remember watching the news for the weeks after this earthquake as they tried to find the dead and survey the damage.

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Art, Maps

Hurricane Coasters

I’ve been creating maps of hurricanes for the last few years. My job involves writing software to assess the impact of an approaching storm, so during an active hurricane season I become a bit obsessed. When you watch these things so closely and so constantly they get burned into your memory. They almost enter your subconscious. They become inkblots on a Rosharch test. Irene, Isaac, Sandy. I started seeing hurricanes everywhere.

hurricane_rorschach

I decided to create something that took these shapes that I was so familiar with. These shapes that were burned into my head. These shapes had become such a constant presence in my mind I figured it was only fitting to make them a constant presence in my home as well, so I created a set of coasters.

hurricane_coasters

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Art, Data Visualization, Maps

Physical Maps – My 360|intersect Presentation

I recently had the privilege  of presenting at 360|intersect in Seattle. My talk explored creating physical map using various techniques like 3D printing, laser cutting, etc. This was a much more artistic exploration than a lot of my previous work, and I am incredibly proud of the pieces I produced. The full video of my presentation is embedded below. I’ll be documenting each of the projects I created in future blog posts, but for now here’s the 45-minute long presenation:

And if you just want to see an overview of the various projects before watching the video, here’s a quick preview of all the projects that I talk about in the presentation:

360_intersect_projects

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Art, Data Visualization, Maps

Printing Hurricanes as Gifts

We had a very busy month of August at SpatialKey as Hurricane Irene tore through the east coast. Our insurance customers were constantly watching Irene as it built up and approached land, then as it swept through parts of North Carolina, Vermont, New York, etc, and then as it died out quietly. We were writing software to visualize hurricane forecasts in real-time, as the storm was approaching, and getting immediate feedback from our customers. It was all a bit stressful, but exhilarating.

I wanted to have some kind of gift of thanks to give to our most helpful customers, who worked closely with us, helping us develop our hurricane product. To be honest, it felt like we all weathered a storm together during that hectic week in August. We brainstormed on sending out shirts, or bags, or some other standard corporate gear, but none of it really felt like “us”. So I came up with a more unique gift that I think captures our culture.

This is a 3D model of Hurricane Irene. The height of the model represents the wind speed at that location. You can see there are 3 bands of different wind speeds. The outer band represents where wind speeds hit 39 mph, the next band represents 58 mph, and the third band represents 74 mph (hurricane force winds). Then running through the middle we have the path of the eye of the storm, and the height of that track represents the exact speed at that point in time (Irene got up to 120 mph).

I created the model by taking the GIS data straight from NOAA and using that to build up the 3D model by hand. Then I sent the 3D model off to Shapeways for printing. The printed version you see in the photos is made out of alumide, which is sort of a composite aluminum material.

For our customers who were working with us while Irene passed through, we hope this will be a nice reminder of the work we did. It’s just a little paperweight to sit on your desk, but for those who were watching Irene as it developed and keeping a very close eye on the footprint of the storm, I think it’s a nice memento.

A hurricane can be a difficult concept to understand. For those affected in its path, it’s an incredibly tangible, visceral thing. But for those watching from afar (like me, sitting in California), it’s less “real”. We hear the overly-dramatic news reports and the doom-and-gloom predictions, but it’s a purely theoretical experience. Having a little paperweight of the storm on my desk doesn’t really help me understand the true impact Irene had on all those folks along the east coast, but at least I can touch it.

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Art, Data Visualization

Iraq Death Dots – Visualizing Each Death in the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs

What would 108,394 deaths look like?

I’ve been combing through the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs dataset and experimenting with different visualizations. This new one shows each individual death logged in the data. A single death is drawn as a single dot. The color of the dot indicates who was killed: either a civilian, a coalition soldier, an Iraqi soldier, or an enemy combatant. These classifications are taken directly from the military records, I did not categorize the data myself in any way. The dataset documents exactly 108,394 deaths, so exactly 108,394 dots are drawn.

Coalition soldiers are white dots, Iraqi forces are gray dots, enemy forces are blue dots, and civilians are red dots. At a glance you can see the shift from the heavy blue in the early days of the war to the overwhelming red. Let that soak in for a second. Every red dot is a civilian life.

The live visualization is embedded below. Or view a larger standalone version.

This movie requires Flash Player 9.

Explore the visualization by selecting a different tab along the top (Years, Months, Incident Type, Category, Casualty Type) or by using the plus and minus buttons to zoom in and out of the visualization. I encourage you to experience the visualization in full screen (use the full-screen button on the bottom-right).

The data

This dataset uses the dataset produced by the Guardian, which filtered the full WIkileaks dataset to only include records with one or more deaths logged. It contains 52,048 records that document 108,394 deaths.

Please note that this data only contains incidents documented by Multi-National Force – Iraq and presents only a partial, incomplete record of the war. Please see this article about issues with this dataset.

Inspiration

This work was inspired by Kamel Makhloufi, who created some fantastic images that colored individual pixels by the type of casualty.

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Art, Maps, SpatialKey

Night Vision Maps of the WikiLeaks Iraq Casualty Data




In 1990 I was an eight year-old kid. And like most eight year-olds I spent a lot of time in front of my TV. But the summer of 1990 was different. Instead of cartoons I was watching the first Gulf War.

The television media coverage of the war was everywhere. Except these weren’t the gruesome images of the Vietnam era. These were images that looked more like videogames. We had cameras attached to bombs that used night vision and targeting scopes as they dove into buildings. All the images were a bit fuzzy, a bit grainy, either tones of gray or green, and overall void of emotion.

But we were watching people die.

The disconnect between the emotionless images shown on TV and the reality that they represented has always stuck with me. The fact that we could (and still do) present something so horrible in such a clinical, disconnected way makes my head spin.

WikiLeaks Iraq data

I’ve been experimenting with mapping the recently released data from WIkileaks that documents deaths in Iraq. All told the data documents 108,365 deaths, which we assume are just a fraction of the true casualty count from this war. Of those deaths, 65,641 were civilians.

I’ve used SpatialKey to produce some heatmaps of these deaths by recreating the aesthetic of the night vision images we’ve grown so used to seeing. I downloaded the data from the compiled spreadsheet published by the Guardian. Each image has a high resolution version available (2,474 pixels by 1,419 pixels).

A view of the entire country


High resolution version

A closer look at the area of Baghdad


High resolution version

More details of Baghdad


High resolution version

Why?

These images are meant to be a bit provocative. Every tiny blurred dot represents someone dying. And yet it’s all presented in a way that everyone is comfortable with. When you glance at these images you don’t immediately think of killing. We’re so used to seeing emotionless, blurry images of rockets exploding and precision bombs targeting buildings that we disconnect the image from the reality. These are images of death. And the fact that we’re comfortable looking at them should give us pause.

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Art, Data Visualization, Maps

If San Francisco Crime were Elevation

I’ve been playing with different ways of representing data (see my previous night lights example) and I decided to venture into 3D representations. I’ve used a full year of crime data for San Francisco from 2009 to create these maps. The full dataset can be download from the city’s DataSF website.

A view from above

This view shows different types of crime in San Francisco viewed directly from above. The sun is shining from the east, as it would during sunrise.

top_500

I love how some of the features in these maps are pretty consistent across all the crime types, like the mountain ridge along Mission St., and how some of the features only crop up in one or two of the maps. The most unique map by far is the one for prostitution (more on that further down).

An alternate view

Here’s the same data but from a different angle, which helps show some of the differences.

UPDATE: Whoops, I screwed up originally and had a duplicate image. The original graphic showed the same map for Vandalism and Assault (both were the Vandalism map). This updated graphic has the correct map for Assault.

right_500_2

Many of the maps have peaks in the Tenderloin, which is that high area sort of in the north-east center area of the city. Some are extremely concentrated (narcotics) and some are far more spread out (vehicle theft).

My favorite map is the one for prostitution (maybe “favorite” is the wrong choice of words there). Nearly all the arrests for prostitution in San Francisco occur along what I’m calling the “Mission Mountain Ridge”, which runs up Mission St between 24th and 16th.

EDIT: I’ve been corrected. Upon closer inspection the prostitution arrests are peaking on Shotwell St. at the intersections of 19th and 17th. I’m sure the number of colorful euphemisms you can come up with that include the words “shot” and “well” are endless.

I love the way the mountain range casts a shadow over much of the city. There’s also a second peak in the Tenderloin (which I’m dubbing Mt. Loin).

prostitution_500

Drug crimes are also interesting to look at, since so much of the drug activity in San Francisco is centered in a few distinct areas. We can see Mt. Loin rising high above all the other small peaks. The second highest peak is the 16th St. BART peak.

drugs_500

There are other consistent features in these maps, in addition to Mt. Loin and the Mission Range. There’s a valley that separates the peaks in the Mission and the peaks in the Tenderloin, which is where the freeway runs (Valley 101). You’ll also notice a division in many of the maps that separates the southeast corner. That’s the Hunter’s Point Riverbed (aka the 280 freeway).

Disclaimer

These maps were generated from real data, but please don’t take them as being accurate. The data was aggregated geographically and artistically rendered. This is meant more as an art piece than an informative visualization.

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