flowerGarden sees the light again!

Greg Judelman and I are getting ready for the "Speculative Data and the Creative Imaginary, Shared Visions between Art and Technology" exhibition at the National Academy of Science (June 4-August 24). We have 2 visualizations in the exhibit, the flowerGarden and the NorthernWords. Both of these were done at the Banff New Media Institute (BNMI) during my tenure there.

The flowerGarden was created in June 2005 as part of the Bodies in Play Summit that was held at the BNMI. It is actually the second iteration on a work that surfaced as part of a participatory exercise at the Simulation and Other Re-Enactments Summit the year prior. Both summits were funded as part of a SSHRC (Sara Diamond, PI). We are deeply indebted to the fertile ground of the summits and to the participants who generouslyuploaded information about their conversations.

You can see the "re-enactment" of the flowerGarden growth here.


The NorthernWords visualization (pictured above with cutout) is a visualization of the evolution of the Banff New Media Institute (BNMI) discourse over the last decade. The look was inspired by the ebb and flow dance of the Northern Lights that frequent the skies above the Banff Centre in Canada’s Rocky Mountains. The word frequency statistics were generated by Andrew Salway using a text analysis package from the University of Surrey called System Quirk. The input was the corpus of texts in BNMI’s 1993-2004 archives (websites, summit agendas, press releases, etc.) . These frequencies were mapped both to word size and glow intensity. Large words with a bright glow behind were important topics in the discourse in that year, while small words with a dark sky behind were less significant.

The NorthernWords visualization was a collaboration between Greg Judelman, Maria Lantin, Matthew Sloly, and Andrew Salway.