Brief Summary of Project

Cloud Bridge explores how data can be visualized to facilitate finding and understanding in a multi-dimensional innovative way. The project examines a history of checked-out items by patrons of the Seattle Public Library acquired through the "Making Visible the Invisible" artwork by George Legrady. Cloud Bridge is comprised of a central data visualization application, a MySQL database, a sound system and an iOS interface which allows the user to interact with the application. Instead of serving a static visualization, it encourages the audiences to dynamically query the dataset thus creating their own visualization on the fly, tailored to their interest.

Project description

In this era of Big Data, the analysis and use of data with appropriate tools have become as significant as natural resources. The Internet has created massive capacities of data in diverse fields in different type of dataset. As such, the importance of data visualization is increasingly growing in computer science, digital media art, and social science fields.

Cloud Bridge explores how data can be visualized and sniffed to facilitate findings, understand and analyze information by using multi-dimensional representation in an innovative way. It unfolds the history of item check-out records from the Seattle Public Library. Although surrounded by technologies, the artists are driven by the idea of combining traditional art representations with new interactive media projects. Therefore, Cloud Bridge opens up the possibility of scaling among different mediums: from traditional prints, desktop/laptop displays, to gallery-style installations with mobile device interaction, and even large-scale immersive stereoscopic environments.

As a multi-dimensional installation, Cloud Bridge not only scales the historical data into a XYZN dimension, but also sonifies it for resonating our bodies. Different from most data visualization projects that provide the audiences with a fully prepared display, this immersive artwork focuses on encouraging multiple users to dynamically query the dataset thus create their own audiovisual pieces, explore the history of item transactions from different perspectives, and discover their own stories on the fly, tailored to their interests. Users can query the database by typing keyword through iOS devices, and receive related items’ history. The results retrieved from each user are visualized and sonified in each designated color.

The project examines a history of checked-out items by patrons of the Seattle Public Library acquired through the "Making Visible the Invisible" artwork by George Legrady.

Cloud Bridge - Paper

1. Liu, Q., Han, Y., Kuchera-Morin, J., Wright, M. and Legrady, G. Cloud Bridge: a Data-driven Immersive Audio-Visual Software Interface. In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), Daejeon+Seoul, South Korea, 2013.