Jer Thorp presentation

JER THORP

Biography (including birthday and date of death if no longer living (or you are psychic))

• Jer Thorp is an artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada, currently living in New York. Coming from a background in genetics, his digital art practice explores the many-folded boundaries between science and art.
• Thorp’s award-winning software-based work has been exhibited in Europe, Asia, North America, South America, and Australia and all over the web.
• Jer has over a decade of teaching experience, in Langara College’s Electronic Media Design Program, at the Vancouver Film school, and as an artist-in-residence at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Most recently, he has presented at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art, at Eyebeam in New York City, and at IBM’s Center for Social Software in Cambridge.
• He is currently Data Artist in Residence at the New York Times, and is an adjunct Professor in New York University’s ITP program.

Generative Art Connections

• Thorp’s work takes the appeal of infographics into the realm of art, as he reminds us of our shared immersion in concepts and words while presenting a gorgeous image to contemplate our connectedness.

• Artist whose medium is data
• Expert in the processing language
• Data visualization
• Current events
• Data in a human context

Generative Works

• 138 Years of Popular Science (2011)
• graphic that showed how different technical and cultural terms have come in and out of use in the magazine since its inception.
• Project Cascade (2010 – 2011)
• project that visualizes the sharing activity of New York Times content over social networks.
• Random Number Multiples (2011)
• Screenprints from the “Random Number Multiple” series. The first, titled ‘RGB – NYT Word Frequency’, shows usage of the words ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘blue’ in the Times between 1981 and 2011. My second print visualizes the terms ‘hope’ and ‘crisis’ over the same time period.
• Sustained Silent Reading (2010)
• uses semantic analysis to ‘read’ through a base of content.
• Wired UK, August 2010 (2010)
• visual representation of cellular phone records from a pool of 10 million users in an anonymous European country.
• Haiti Earthquake aid – in Avatar minutes (2010)
• a visualization tool showing how much different countries and organizations have pledged to the Haiti eathquake aid effort. Represented in how many minutes of the film, Avatar, the aid would pay for.
• Code.lab (2010)
• A combination of pedagogy, performance, and interactive installation, Code.lab was a unique collaboration between artists, students, and the public during the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver.
• 9/11 Memorial Names Arrangement Algorithm & Placement Tool (2010)
• algorithm and an accompanying software tool to aid in the placement of the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan.
• Two Sides of the Same Story (2009)
• Built in Processing, this tool allows for free comparison of any two bodies of text.
• Wired UK, July 2009 (2009)
• Using a series of generative graphics, the piece investigates the discrepancies between the demographics of the UK’s National DNA Database and of the UK population in general.
• Good Morning! (2009)
• GoodMorning! is a Twitter visualization tool that shows about 11,000 ‘good morning’ tweets over a 24 hour period, rendering a simple sample of Twitter activity around the globe.
• Just Landed (2009)
• Just Landed finds tweets containing the phrases ‘just landed in…’ and ‘just arrived in…’ and provides map-based visualization of these tweets over time.
• NYTimes: 365/360 (2009)
• Built in Processing, this set of visualizations shows the top organizations and personalities for every year from 1985 to 2001, by occurrence in the New York Times. Connections between these people & organizations are indicated by lines.
• Glocal Image Breeder (2008)
• Using genetic algorithms, the system can suggest images from a database of 8,000 images which could conceivably be ‘children’ of any two images that the user suggests.

Quotes

• “The amount of available data, I think, is quickly outpacing our ability to use it in useful and novel ways.”
• “This project was a very real reminder that information carries weight. While names of the dead may be the heaviest data of all, almost every number or word we work with bears some link to a significant piece of the real world. It’s easy to download a data set – census information, earthquake records, homelessness figures - and forget that the numbers represent real lives. As designers, artists, and researchers, we always need to consider the true source of data, and the moral responsibility which they carry.”
• “I know I’ve said this before, but be patient.”
• “The art itself is the software.”

Bibliography

• http://blog.blprnt.com/
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• http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/06/the-art-itself-is-the-software-jer-thorp-on-the-aesthetics-of-data/

External Links

• Jer Thorp’s official website: http://blog.blprnt.com