With the rise of cloud computing, data centers are popping up all over that are filled with heat-emitting servers. These servers are comprised of motherboards, and the motherboards must be cooled to prevent overheating. Technology companies pay energy costs to run the servers, and an additional 50% of the cost of running the servers simply to cool them with fans. Why not eliminate the fans and......read more
We're always interested in work that cultivates the fertile zone where art and science overlap, and Andreas Nicolas Fischer does it better than most. With his "Schwarm" series, the Munich-born, Berlin-based artist created prints of beautiful abstract forms, generated using his own custom software. "The software uses a swarm of particles to gradually create an abstract composition based on a......read more
The April 16 volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash all over northern Europe, grinding air travel to a halt for several days. This neato animation, produced by UK web mapping services company ITO World, visualizes what happened to European airspace in the aftermath. ...read more
With their newly unveiled Wind Map, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg use their impressive data visualization skills to create a real-time, flowing image of wind currents the United States. The pair, who are employed as co-directors of Google's "Big Picture" visualization group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are using the art project to promote wind power development. "An......read more
Data visualization artist Aaron Koblin teamed with director Ben Tricklebank to produce a piece for Doug Aitken's Station to Station public art project, currently traveling across the country by train. “Doug reached out to me a while back and said, ‘I’m working on this train-based art extravaganza, what could you do in that context?’” Koblin told Wired.......read more
Kate Galbraith for The New York Times: Geothermal energy — tapping into heat deep underground and using it to produce power — is sometimes described as a forgotten renewable. It languishes in the shadows of better-known sources like wind and the sun, and in 2011 it accounted for less than 1 percent of electric power worldwide, according to last year’s World Energy Outlook. Yet......read more
Fact: The more pot high school seniors smoke, the more music they buy. That's just one of the many offbeat sociological observations made by Australian artist Jonathan Zawada in Over Time, a series of oil paintings that recently wrapped its run at Prism Gallery in LA. A self-described "tech junkie," Zawada collected random bits of data — like the value of land over time in Dubai vs. in......read more
This is no porno. This is planet earth, where last year we saw a tie for the hottest year on record and the wettest year since record keeping began in 1880. What does this mean? Greenhouse gases are clearly affecting our planet and climate change isn't some future problem. It is here, now. Climate scientists predict that the continuing affects of climate change will bring about not only a......read more