1987 – All the Submarines of the United States of America

This installation from American artist Chris Burden shows the 625 submarines of the US fleet from the late 1890s to the late 1980s. The cardboard models have been suspended at different heights to look like a school of fish. Also see our other entries on single-datum physical visualizations. Sources: Found on Loren Madsen's lecture slides Art as Information – Information as Art. Wikipedia article on Chris Burden. Photo from Giorgia Valli, Grey Magazine.

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Passive physical visualization Tags: installation, single-datum, submarines, walkable

2018 – The 20 Year Gap

This data physicalization is an art installation that represents the difference in disability-free life expectancy* and overall life expectancy for different areas in the UK, thereby highlighting the unequal health conditions in the country. Each area is represented by a hanging thread. On each thread a red bottle corresponds to disability-free life expectancy while the blue bottle represents overall life expectancy. The title of the artwork refers to the finding that in the UK there is gap of […]

This data physicalization is an art installation that represents the difference in disability-free life expectancy* and overall life expectancy for different areas in the UK, thereby highlighting the unequal health conditions in the country. Each area is represented by a hanging thread. On each thread a red bottle corresponds to disability-free life expectancy while the blue bottle represents overall life expectancy. The title of the artwork refers to the finding that in the UK there is gap of just over 20 years between the lowest and highest average disability-free life expectancy. The artwork was created by SRG Bennett and Cath Sleeman and first shown at FutureFest 2018 in London. Source: SRG Bennett and Cath Sleeman (2018) The 20 Year Gap. * "the number of years a person can expect to live without a limiting persistent illness or disability"

Added by: Petra Isenberg. Category: Passive physical visualization Tags: art, installation

2018 – ON BRINK: Live Physicalization of the Bitcoin Blockchain

ON BRINK is a physical data visualisation of the Bitcoin blockchain: Adapting the mining metaphor, it encodes data on blocks appended to the chain in real-time. It produces piles of soil that relate in size to the number of transactions within a block, and displays six of them at a time on a continuous conveyor system, thus reflecting the human attention span given to a transaction on the blockchain: A transaction counts as confirmed after five blocks have been appended to its containing block. […]

ON BRINK is a physical data visualisation of the Bitcoin blockchain: Adapting the mining metaphor, it encodes data on blocks appended to the chain in real-time. It produces piles of soil that relate in size to the number of transactions within a block, and displays six of them at a time on a continuous conveyor system, thus reflecting the human attention span given to a transaction on the blockchain: A transaction counts as confirmed after five blocks have been appended to its containing block. A display informs about the latest block appended to the chain. As the passed blocks accumulate to a growing pile at the end of the conveyor system, the initial pile of soil keeps decreasing: our digital tools are strongly dependent on physical resources. ON BRINK relates our digital to our physical environment by physicalizing the human-related data points of time, location and participation of the Bitcoin blockchain. Source: Dustin Stupp, ON BRINK

Added by: Dustin Stupp. Category: Active physical visualization Tags: bitcoin, blockchain, conveyor, installation, soil