Photo: Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenburg Team Up to Create "Wind Map"
Described as a “living portrait of the wind currents over the U.S.,” Wind Map is a project between artists Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg using data from the National Digital Forecast Database.
Wattenberg:
An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future. The wind map shows the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US.
Fernanda Viégas and I created the wind map in the cold winter months when wind was much on our minds. It conveys the movement of the air in the most basic way: with visual motion. As an artwork that reflects the real-world, its emotional meaning changes from day to day. On calm days it can be a soothing meditation on the environment; during hurricanes it can become ominous and frightening.
Viegas and Wattenberg’s project expressed the wind patterns of Hurricane Sandy (later down graded to ‘post-tropical cyclone) via real-time wind map patterns.
Below is a shot of the Wind Map during Sandy, and you can click here to see the real-time Wind Map.
Fernanda B. Viégas is a computational designer bron in Brazil whose work focuses on the social, collaborative, and artistic aspects of information visualization. She is a is a co-leader, with Martin Wattenberg, of Google’s “Big Picture” data visualization group in Cambridge, MA.
Martin Wattenberg is a computer scientist and artist. He is a co-leader, with Viégas and is known for his visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York Museum of Modern Art.
