Olivier Jean: Movement Series

On Data Visualisation… Two instances of a visual image that changed the thinking of the world come to mind. My tutor once recounted an exhibition he saw as a child, of the first landing on the moon. The young Simon walked into the gallery, on the wall in front of him was a vast image of space, with the Earth in the centre, and he could hold out his thumb so that it eclipsed the planet earth. He remembers the power of that photograph, and the shift in consciousness, which ultimately changed society's perception of the Earth. Earth could be comprehended as a fragile, finite, solitary, thumb-sized dot.

The second powerful image is the graphic visualisation of the ozone hole in the atmosphere, which prompted changes in regulations restricting CHC’s and a global awareness of greenhouse gases. 

One can argue that visualisation of information can change our perception and therefore our thinking in both a personal and a collective manner.

I would like to present some images from Olivier Jean's recent work on data visualisation.

The first two images reveal data on New Zealand and Japanese earthquakes from January to March 2011. Olivier sources data from the internet, collects the variables into a spreadsheet format, and uses an open source software ‘Processing’ to transform the data. ‘Processing’ passes the values through a series of algorithms to create forms, which Oliver then brings into Illustrator using the ‘Scriptographer’ plug-in to modify and edit the drawing. 

The forms are therefore both aesthetic and functional, drawn from information, for the purpose of communication, they seek to ‘find meaning’ in ‘a bunch of numbers’.

The drawings produced allow the viewer to see and understand large amounts of information at once in an intuitive and accessible way. Olivier likens the process to that of long exposure photography, that it makes manifest a time-based collection of events. 

The third image is created from sensors built into the Macbook, this is a drawing of Olivier crossing the road to get a coffee. 

Data visualisation is a trans-disciplinary mode of working, which channels a select stream of variables from the immense databank of the web, and processes these numbers to visualise what was previously invisible.