Art with Flight Patterns Video

Art with Flight Patterns Video Transcript

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>>Hey there, I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET NEWS.com, about to go to a gallery open to meet up with a guy, who has been called a video artist, visual artist, data artist even. You may not know his name, Aaron Koblin, but I bet you've seen his videos, probably on YouTube.

>>[Background noise] [Background music] That's a piece titled Flight Pattern, Aaron Koblin's best known video. What you're looking at is days of raw flight data, originally in spreadsheet form, but now set to motion.

>>[Background music] I just basically wrote a program that said, alright, place this airplane here and this airplane here and now connect them overtime and you get to see it animate.

>>[Background music] The video took off online. Passed around from friend to friend, because it's just so mesmerizing to watch.

>>[Background music] I really haven't done a whole lot of self promotion.

>>[Background music] Um-hm.

>>[Background music] It's just kind of been the beauty of the web. People see something and tell somebody and it spreads from there.

>>[Background music] At one point, it even won a coveted spot on YouTube's front page.

>>[Background music] What's also really interesting, is that the range of exposure it's gotten.

>>[Background music] Um-hm.

>>[Background music] I mean, the National Science Foundation gave me the first place award for science visualization, but then at the same time it was on Adult Swim, you know, [Laughter] right before Family Guy, it's like wow, that kind of appealed to that broad of an audience, but pretty happy.

>>[Background music] A similar project is one titled New York Talk Exchange.

>>[Background music] Basically, we took data from AT&T and visualized the way that New York was communicating with the rest of the world. And we did that through both long distance phone calls and also through IP flow, so email and web traffic.

>>[Background music] By plotting this information, Aaron said real patterns emerged. Like what New York neighborhoods communicate with which towns in any given country.

>>[Background music] You can really make those comparisons on the fly in a way that numbers and words don't necessarily convey.

>>[Background music] His next two video projects rely on Amazons web service called the Mechanical Turk.

>>[Background music] Basically it allows you to pay people to work through the internet, a totally distributed labor management tool. They call it artificial, artificial intelligence.

>>[Background music] For the sheep market video, Aaron paid people two cents to draw a sheep. How were you able to record their actual brush strokes and drawings?

>>[Background music] I just made a little application that works on the web browser and basically pointed them to it and said go ahead and draw and they didn't really know that they were being recorded, but ah, it's just a little flash base thing.

>>[Background music] Over 40 days, he collected 10,000 different shapes.

>>[Background music] It's about 7,599 unique IP addresses. So, that gives a pretty good sense of how many people probably worked on the project.

>>[Background music] Of all animals, Aaron shows the sheep for its symbolism. Think of Dolly, the clone sheep, and the way she reprocessed for their by-products.

>>[Background music] There's also a reference in the book Le Petit Prince and basically the narrators asked to keep drawing sheep. And he draws sheep after sheep and then they got the kings never appeased and finally uh, you know, he draws a box and says you know, think outside the box, don't keep making scientific representations but be a more creative individual.

>>[Background music] Also using the mechanical turk, Aaron builds a video called 10,000 cents.

>>[Background music] Nobody really has any context of what their actually doing.

>>[Background music] Because you get this one little piece and you have to copy that.

>>[Background music] Exactly, yep, so they just have a basic drawing tool and it records their process. It's actually really entertaining, because some people will kind of start to work on the project and then will get really pissed off and cover it up but I hate you.

>>[Laughter] And somehow that is like woven into the funnel?

>>[Background music] Yea, and all that's included in the actual hundred dollar bill. So this gives you a visual idea of how many people did what they were asked to do versus how many kind of rebelled.

>>[Background music] On his website, the videos interactive so you can see how these teeny, tiny 10,000 parts add up to one whole picture.

>>[Background music] I think we were just kind of interested in investigating this type of system and also thinking about the ways that that relates to kind of authenticity and the ways that relates to, you know, visual reproductions and, you know, counterfeiting and lots of issues.

>>[Background music] Aaron turned the finished image into a print that sells for a hundred bucks. 100% of those proceeds benefit the One Laptop per Child Program.

>>[Background music] I think it's really important that we try to bridge the digital divide and, you know, to give people opportunities, you know, to make their own hundred dollar bill applications. But at the same time, I think it is a little bit of a keep thinking about what this really means in the long run.

>>[Background music] Aaron is currently working on a number of other video projects, like a large installation for the San Jose Airport and continues to push his median forward using new technology. I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET NEWS.com. ^M00:04:04 [Music] ^M00:04:09