origin

As we human beings go about our everyday lives, most of us aren’t aware of the enormous quantities of data that we produce along the way. Changes in air pressure, odors, temperature shifts, sounds, our pulse and even our dandruff are some of the unimaginably large amount of things we leave behind us as we go along through life, and that, to an increasing extent, can—and are—being registered by all sorts of tiny high-tech contrivances. Without even going into the many surveillance cameras that undoubtedly shoot our personal sense of security into stratospheric heights, consider, for example, the highly complex smoke detectors, smart thermostats, infrared sensors & Co. There’s hardly anything that can’t be quantified. But we humans have a problem nevertheless: That which explains to us what our world consists of and how it works purportedly cannot be measured, but we won’t be concerned with this too long and get back to what we can have.

Gershon Dublon, Laurel S. Pardue, Brian D. Mayton, Noah Swartz, Patrick Hurst, Nicholas D. Joliat and Joseph A. Paradiso are working at MIT Media Lab on how to depict this sensor data. What they’ve come up with is the Doppellab that will be on display at Ars Electronica 2011. Using interactive computer animation, it offers many options to display the data measured in a particular building, and does so while also taking into account the actions of the people accessing its output. The flood of information isn’t managed strictly visually; it can also be communicated acoustically. This shows—in ever-changing forms and constellations—what we now know about our own environment and, at the same time, what we still cannot know. So, one doesn’t always have to go online to feel overwhelmed by information. A concentrated look at ones own four walls can suffice.

The project was made possible by the support of the Spanish Embassy.