project listing
Shift in the Fabric
Concept
As part of my thesis project at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, A Shift in the Fabric was a computationally driven visual installation. As an installation, it creates, analyzes, and reveals nuances of potential networks and infrastructures in our world.
Through the aggregation of approximately 5000 most populated cities in the world, this project visualizes these as nodes in a variety of different ways, showing network characteristics that can be represented in different visual contexts, where viewers can be left to interpret them in an environment.
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Top Left: This is a traditional map view. Here you get a sense of continents and size of cities (based on the diameter of the clouds)
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Top Right: 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.
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Bottom Left: 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.
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Bottom Right: This is an example of a centralized network emitting out of North Africa somewhere.
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.
Next Steps
This project is a work in progress. For more information about the project's conception, as well as some of its various branches, view the original thesis section of my website!