Stanza Creates Imagery From Real Time London Transport Data In New York Exhibition

The current interest in mapping and the prevalence of investigating data as culture has inspired the UK artist Stanzato create his latest artwork Syncronicity. Synchronicity manipulates the real time transport data to re-interpret the city fabric as an organic pattern based system. Synchronicity becomes a hybridised maze, a cellular and organic system which is presented to the screen. The artwork uses real time bus and tube data from London.

An interface allows manipulation of the parameters and the results. The Syncronicity map builds up in 3d over time and one can change colours to highlight different abstractions based on the data. Concepts What happens in world of merging data streams? How will big data empower the system and does this added value / more freedom or does it seek a more subversive form of control? Syncronicity starts to answer this by merging different live streams of real time data to investigate these visual patterns and organic structures.

There is an interface for drawing different graphical effects such as moving the paths into 3D space based on their timestamps, exploding the 3D element with a slider, changing the FOV of 3D camera, changing the width of lines, changing the alpha blending value of lines.  You can also rotate around the whole map and if you blend it right, you can see that there are way more paths in the centre of the map than the outskirts.

Also, if you set the FOV right, you will get the paths on the outskirts blurring and the ones in the centre in focus, as the camera is pointing here. In drawing all the tube lines, each train is matched to one of the train lines, and drawn with a colour from that document . Speed of tube trains are discovered from their  estimated time to the next stop, and their movement is animated using little circles for every train. 500-600 or so tube trains are used during the day and about 60 at night and over a thousand buses are used in this integrated tube and bus map.   GPU camera effects produce some stunning looking lines with depth of field, blurring things out of focus. Everything anti-aliased without too much effect on performance.   Synchronicity is made using open frameworks and is being made into IOS for I phone.

For twenty years stanza’s artwork have centered on the idea of the city as a display system and various projects have been made using live data, the use of live data in architectural space, and how it can be made into meaningful representations. See ‘Publicity’, ‘Robotica’, ‘Sensity’, as well as a whole series of work manipulating real time CCTV data to making artworks with them: See, ‘Velocity’, ‘Authenticity’, ‘Urban Generation’. These works reform the data, work with the idea of bringing data from outside into the inside, and then present it back out again in open ended systems where the public is often engaged in or directly embedded in the artwork. Interactive and visually appealing, his style also maintains the substantive power through multi-facetted content.

Stanza is an internationally recognised artist, who has been exhibiting worldwide since 1984. His artworks have won twenty international art prizes and art awards including: Vidalife 6.0 First Prize, SeNef Grand Prix, the Videobrasil First Prize, and have been included in over fifty exhibitions globally, including the Venice Biennale, Victoria Albert Museum, and Tate Britain, to name but a few. Educated in fine art at Goldsmiths College in the early eighties he later went on to study at Greenwich University and Central Saint Martins Art College London. He is a pioneer of net art and was one of the first to use internet art as a medium. His websites and net specific artworks have been online since 1995 and these online projects have reached an audience of over four million visitors. Recurring themes throughout his career include the urban landscape, surveillance culture, privacy and alienation in the city. The purpose of his work is to communicate feelings and emotions that we encounter daily which impact on our lives and which are outside our control.

Exhibition: October 4, 2013 Closing: October 25, 2013 Pace Digital Gallery 163 William Street NY

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