Here’s a new project of mine:

X by Y visu­al­izes all sub­mis­sions to the prix ars elec­tron­ica, from the early begin­nings in 1987 up to 2009. The goal is to char­ac­ter­ize the “ars world” in quan­ti­ta­tive terms. A series of dia­grams groups and jux­ta­poses the sub­mis­sions by years, cat­e­gories, prizes and coun­tries. The graph­ics are com­posed of lit­tle dots (each rep­re­sent­ing a sin­gle sub­mis­sion) to pro­vide a visual scale for the sta­tis­ti­cal state­ments and the­ma­tize the rela­tion of the total­ity and the individual.

Their place­ment is com­puted with a Fibonacci series, imi­tat­ing the arrange­ment of sun­flower seeds – a very effi­cient and visu­ally mes­mer­iz­ing way of pack­ing small ele­ments into a large cir­cle. Color dis­tin­guishes the sub­mis­sion cat­e­gories, and a dia­mond shape marks sub­mis­sion that have been awarded a prize. The num­bers in the cen­ter of the dia­gram ele­ments are con­structed by skip­ping points in the pat­tern – estab­lish­ing a tight con­nec­tion between the num­ber and the indi­vid­u­als, but also demon­strat­ing the dual­ity of the two concepts.

The project is cur­rently at dis­play at the his­tory lounge of ars elec­tron­ica 09.

The project was done in coop­er­a­tion with the Lud­wig Boltz­mann Insti­tute for media.art.research. Find all dia­grams and some more info here: X by Y. Also, don’t miss the other works on the poster over at vis.mediaartresearch.at.