Tools for Field Notes From A Mine
V2_ lab has been collaborating on a part of the project by Martijn van Boven and Tom Tlalim - Field Notes From A Mine. As part of this collaboration Artm Baguinsky made a number of project specific software tools for data exploration.
In the past months V2_ lab has been collaborating on a part of the project by Martijn van Boven and Tom Tlalim - Field Notes From A Mine. As part of this collaboration Artm Baguinsky made a number of project specific software tools for data exploration.
Geocacher: A Perl script that combines data from historical trade routes database and modern geographic information systems. The historical route data comes form OWTRAD (Old World Trade Routes) database, the geographic information – form geonames.org – a database / aggregator of geographic and climate data. In order to make old routes "travelable" using interactive tools that Martijn van Boven and Tom Tlalim use in their practice, the Geocacher script "walks" along the routes and caches on their computers all sort of data they might be interested in encountering: current political map, elevation above the sea level, current weather etc.
Traveller: a combination of Max/MSP and javascript that allows to explore the data in the cache. The artists select initial location and final destination, the script finds a path along the cached trade routes and provides a simple API for traveling along that route. As they travel, other cached data is "discovered" and presented as a bunch of numbers. These numbers then control audio visual synthesis tools beyond my control or knowledge.
IDW interpolator in Max/jitter: a number of alternative implementations of Inverse Distance Weighting multivariate interpolation in Max/javascript/Jitter. Interpolator allows to "fill in gaps" in parameter values given a sparse map of measurement. For example, given current temperature reports from a number of weather stations, the interpolator can estimate what's the temperature in between the stations. The same method is used for mixing "presets" of audio / visual synthesizers (where each preset may contain some real world measurements and some synthesis parameters chosen by the artist). I started with a sluggish but easy to write javascript implementation, which provided me an opportunity to experiment with the programming interface to the interpolator, soon found that its speed was unsatisfactory and continued to write a couple of alternative implementations using jitter's matrix math:
With these (and other) tools Martijn van Boven and Tom Tlalim have proceeded to create an abstract cut up movie documenting their journey through the databases along the ancient trade routes. Here are some stills, just to tease your curiosity.
