Flow
An interactive, generative art installation by Mathieu Le Sourd that translates real-time data about water temperature and sea level into this undulating visualization.
In an interview with the artist, he talks about giving the system “enough intelligence and randomness” so that the visuals become “organic and unpredictable.” This, I think, is one of the great challenges for making interesting visualizations, finding the balance between incomprehensible chaos and uninteresting stasis.
Note also the use of the unusual inputs, translating the numbers in the database into movement and sound that humans could absorb. As a group, we’re very bad at understanding masses of numbers, but very good at comprehending the general sense of them once they’re translated into a form that we can directly experience.
While this is for an art installation, there are also more practical uses: a monitoring system that produces warnings that humans humans can more easily detect dangerous changes is a tool that can make us safer.