Welcome to Variable Newsletter #1. Many things happened at Variable in 2016 and 2017 so let’s begin…
Data Is Not a Number
Does data have a shape? Or is data a place we can visit? Read more on why “Data is Not a Number” and how we think of data as an art material.
Rat.Systems
The Rodent Activity Transmission Systems project monitors a colony of naked mole-rats and produces two kind of outputs: a data visualisation website, trying to explain the current state of the colony based on the tracking data and more artistic interpretation of the eusocial colony. We’ve recently released accompanying apps on the App Store and Google Play so you can follow them even on the go!
The Book of Circles
Carrot2 Search cluster visualization we had done in 2008 has been featured in http://bookofcircles.com by Manuel Lima.
Talks
Marcin has been recently speaking about “Data that can be experienced and not only counted” (video) at Data+Visual and DataKindUK, “Data is Not a Number” (video) (interview) at SHACK15 data science hub, “Meta Design” at Krakatoa talk club in Bratislava and “Data Layers” at Architectural Association.
Upcoming Talks:
Levels of Abstraction in Data Visualization at Visualising Data London, May 25th, London, UKFrom Abstraction To Realism and Back at EYEO’17 June 26–29th, Minneapolis, US
PBR in PEX Renderer
We are currently working on a new version of our in-house WebGL renderer for the PEX library. It’s based on new modern (command based) core called pex-context and features Physically Based Rendering (PBR), gamma correct rendering pipeline, HDR postprocessing, redesigned component entity system (CES) scene graph and native glTF file format support.