Images

Now, as we enter the tenth dimension, we have to imagine all the possible branches for all the possible timelines of all the possible universes and treat that as a single point in the tenth dimension..

Rob Bryanton, Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Your head will hurt afterwards (mine does), but it’s really a fascinating theoretical-physics presentation.

Manuel Lima’s Visual Complexity is a massive—350 works—showcase of cognitive art and a beautiful tour de force.

Pay for Performance—Death and Taxes—USA Air—Figurative system of human knowledge—Flickr User Model—Map of Scientific Paradigms—Time Graphs: Sunsets by time (also check Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner)—Visual Correlation for Situational Awareness (read the paper, it’s worth it)—Mark Lombardi’s Narrative Structure, and Inside cobot’s head rank among my favorites, what about you?

Tufte’s Museum of Cognitive Art^ELZR is in the offing, I can smell it. La coyuntura es propicia.

Ironically, I must confess I sometimes preferred to reload the project’s homepage and quickly hit stop. The mosaic is beautiful and impressive, but also overwhelming. The thumbnails’ plain titles were more useful for the exploratory browsing I needed to digest the hugeness of it all.

vs.

Simile is a simple, snappy AJAX timeline from MIT. To keep with the space-time musings of late, it’s a Google Maps for time.

Overview and Detail. The pair keeps coming up whenever you start pondering on interfaces, interface patterns, interface & information design, and well (why won’t be grand?) space, time,^ELZR and thought itself. Achieving both—the ancient dream of simultaneity—is one of the deep purposes of any media creator, from writers^EE to interface designers, and though it may be a humble example, The Secret Lives of Numbers—an interface to the results of a crazy study of the search-engine popularity of every integer between 0 and 1 million¹—is a superb one.

Click to view a 3.15-Mb PDF critique of the interface (right-click and select Save Link As to download)

As for the credits:

If you believe in geniuses you’re in for a treat checking out the three URLs above—each of them’s one. Martin Watenberg in particular, has some of the most intriguing information visualizations I’ve ever seen.

¹ Though owing to limitations of internet bandwidth only data for the first 100,000 are provided online.

I loved the above composition. Perhaps it’s just that I took Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics^WP epiphany too seriously, but I feel there’s something deep about it. Space and time are one, do you see? The three small panels on top convey a quick sequence (and I can’t help but hear a zippo clicking open and the smallest of sighs), while the long panel invites us to rest on her at leisure. And we can go back, turn back time and see it all over again. Or stop it altogether and focus on the third panel with its bright flame. Or we can go backwards, make it into an infinitely regressive spiral. Or we can try and take it all in one visual gulp. Present is where you are. And all it takes is looking.

Space is time’s ultimate interface.

There’s also another superb quick-closeup, similar in structure, in Animatrix^WP ’s Final Flight of the Osiris^WP. It’s more joltingly impactful, to be sure, but that’s also its greatest shortcoming: it’s gone before you notice it. Our interfaces have evolved and our media player can let us see it slowly, frame by frame, but we can’t readily choose our frame. We can’t try and take it all and dream of synchronicity. That is, we can’t unless we space the frames.

There’s something deep about Riya, the new image search engine, that bugs me. It reminds me a lot of a group in my university that was developing a digital whiteboard back in 2002. It was a fascinating technology, and, these being the days of Minority Report^{WP, IMDB}, I was infatuated with the possibilities. The thing was expensive and bulky, but allowed for some really sweet, unprecedented interaction with the computer not that far from those of said movie.

Via Adolfo, who seems to be reading good stuff lately.