As part of my thesis project at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, A Shift in the Fabric was a computationally driven visual installation, which created, analyzed, and showed nuances of potential networks and infrastructures in our world.

Through the aggregation of around 5000 of the most populated cities in the world, this project visualizes these as nodes in a variety of different map spaces, so that network characteristics can be represented, and individuals can be left to interpret them in a visual environment.

This is a traditional map view. Here you get a sense of continents and size of cities (based on the diameter of the clouds)

This is an example of a centralized network emitting out of North Africa somewhere.

These are examples of "caveman" style networks, where connections are made in tightly regionalized spaces, and occasionally make one leap outside of this area to another location.

This is the beginning of the view when exploring an ecosystem of various networks and protocols, all of which share common nodes. Here in this example, different colors represent different types of connections and/or infrastructures.

Having control over the connections, as well as the nodes, allows for flexibility in moving the nodes into different arrangements, thereby allowing us to see different relationships between the nodes when put into different mappings.

This is an example of a rank order by population, in which the cities fan out, allowing you to view characteristics of these nodes from a macro level. Gray connections here represent "caveman" world networks, green represent small world's networks, and the red is the beginning of a centralized connection.

There are a lot of practical reasons to have a visualization tool like this, other than just for aesthetic and artistic expression. I've been working with the Idaho Youth Summit, a drug prevention conference, to create a mapping of the participants, which also allows for us to explore the social and peer networks between these youth, as a way to visualize and explore the effectiveness of these yearly summer retreats for youth.

This branch of the project is slated to be finished early fall of 2006.

Now that I've successfully tested the boundaries of this tool by creating an environment with thousands of nodes and multiple thousands of connections, "Protocol Sketch" is an open framework I am building out. It will implement some simple tools for adding nodes, creating random network layers, and maintaining control of complex connection structures.

Built in Java, I hope to release the API and cross-platform files sometime early 2007.

Thesis Paper Outline/Table of Contents and these Visuals available here.

Simplified Sketch of Potential Visualization

Design Schema, Scaled Out

This is a cycle I'm tweaking, as one basis for my thesis argument.

Some Sources of Inspiration

Theoretical Timeline in which these narratives take place

Introduction to the logic of my installation

Emergency Communities - New Orleans, LA

Death of Sound, 2005 - Jeff Gray. Simple exploration of autonomous self playing musical instruments

MindSketch, 2005 - Jeff Gray. Created as a way to do mind mapping with yourself in realtime, while aggregating complementary words live from a source listing online.

A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram. Pioneer in one dimensional cellualar automation.

The above three are various network examples from Cyber Geography Online

Barabasi, Albert Laszlo. Linked. Pegasus Books, 2002.
Buchanan, Mark. Nexus. W. W. Norton & Company, 2002.
Davies, Paul. How to Build a Time Machine. Penguin Books, 2003.
Dodge, Martin. Cybergeography. 2004. http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html
Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol. MIT Press, 2004.
Ryder, Martin. What is Actor-Network Theory? University of Colorado in Denver.
__http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/ant_dff.html
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point. Back Bay Books, 2002.
Hillis, Daniel W. The Pattern on the Stone. Basic Books, 1998.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage Books, 1992.
McCormack, Jon and Alan Dorin. Art, Emergence, and the Computational Sublime. Center for Electronic Media Art.
__ 24 Jan. 2006. http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jonmc/resources/art-2it.pdf
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees. Verso Books, 2005.
Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone. Simon and Schuster, 2000.
Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor Books, 2005.
Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees. W. W. Norton & Company, 2003.
Watts, Duncan. Small Worlds. Princeton University Press, 2003.
Watts, Duncan. Common World. Princeton University Press, 1999.
Wolf, Gary. Reinventing 911. Wired Magazine Online, Dec. 2005. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/warning_pr.html
Wolfram, Stephen. A New Kind of Science Online. 24 Jan. 2006. http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html