Tour de France 2010

It’s packed with information. At a glance I can see the grade of the mountains, the category of the climbs, the distance travelled along with average speed. The main rider groups are broken out with individual rider names listed directly beneath the animated rider. There is a little commentary with the highlights of the most exciting thing that just happened. It’s perfect! Those little animated riders spinning along the roadway in the appropriately coloured jerseys adds a nice final touch. How they can pull this together in real time is beyond me.

Trimpin referred to his work as a visualization of sound. Sound being primary it must come first. I was inspired by his creativity that kept a childlike wonder persevering past a filing cabinet full of eloquently labeled ‘FU’ letters. Of course those probably ended soon after he won the MacArthur “Genius” Award.

Trimpin’s Klompen was on display after the showing of the documentary at the Vancouver International Film Centre. For a quarter you could experience the wonder of sound emanating from hanging dutch wooden clogs. If you’re interested in hearing a sample of the type of sound & visual creations that you may experience when Trimpin returns to Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics then check out ‘Sheng High’ at

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/collections/audio/2002529199_trimpin30/2002529201_trimpinclip1.html

The documentary was in part about his music experiment with the Kronos Quartet. What interested me most was his creative process and particularly how he visualized his musical scores.

Visual Music Score

Trimpin was present to take questions after the showing and he spoke of the long faces when he shared the visual score with the musicians. In the film he explains how the visual score is a blueprint with open ended paths for experimentation. The film depicts how the collaborators seemed to grow together towards the ultimate presentation on the day of performance, which was aptly named, ‘4 Cast: Unpredictable’.

Trimpin’s experimentation with technologies enable him to create technical feats and artistic wonders such as the automated piano in Ratatatatatt. Being an inventor at heart he custom designs almost everything he creates including the hardware and software. When asked what he would set out to do if he had unlimited funds? He gazes at the questioner quizzically and responds that it is not the money that is the challenge but the limits of time.

Oct. 13/09 More on Ratatatatt.
A Piano Speaks?
While investigating the program ‘processing’ I followed a link to a Pure-Data programming site and found what looks like an example of an invention quite like Trimpin’s ‘ratatatat’ that I thought was interesting.

Ablinger’s pieces “Voices and Piano”

Taste Sensations

BC Budget Visualization Tool from blprnt on Vimeo.

On the way out of a meeting last Friday a couple of colleagues and I walked by a street promotion for the new BC Lotto game Lotto Max that is replacing the Lotto Super 7. The resulting conversation turned to our surprise at the extensive funding cuts in the arts. I’ve heard stats about the funding cuts being as high as 90%. The three of us wondered out loud how much the Lotto Corp is making in profit and how much of a difference it would make to people if the weekly winnings were say $8M instead of $10M. I had a look at the current jackpot and it’s $15M with a maximum jackpot set at $50M. Wow.

It made me think of an advice column in this month’s Wired magazine that recommended to a father to apply John Stuart Mill’s “Greatest Happiness Principle” to the decision about whether to let his son dismantle his old, but still functional, laptop vs. donating it to charity. How would the distribution of lotto funds look if this principle were to be applied?

Unfortunately, the decision for this family is much simpler than the one facing our Provincial community. Community decisions require consensus across large numbers of individuals and groups, policy needs to be applied, administrative overhead needs to be managed, and good cause is pitted against good cause. The choices are never simple and there is often so much information we drown in the details. I’ve often wondered if Visual Analytics could be used effectively by community groups to cut through the information glut to champion their cause.

Then I stumbled across this fine example of visual analytics:
http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/bc-budget-visualizations

Notice that the article even mentions potential data quality problems which readers then promptly comment upon and provide related information. This is community in action.