Earth, Wind, and Fire

The other day, I came across the work of computational artist RJ Duran and was really struck by his
3-d visualization of earth, wind, fire, and water. The shape is what fascinates me the most because the most intricate parts of the root system create the tallest cone shapes above. I wonder though if there is a way to show information in a more patterned way than even this. Right now most of our information trees look really cluttered, but if there was a way to organize facts into interconnected modules that had a common rhythm and pattern, we might be able to navigate them more easily. Something to think about.

3-D Mandelbrot and Information Systems.

One of my main focuses with this blog is to research the pairing of visualization with information and how it can be done more efficiently than it is being done now.

On this note, today I really started embarking on my discovery of visual structures that could provide the inner links to certain groupings of information. Dr. Stephen Wolfram has explored this to a great extent for mathematics and computer science in his book A New Kind of Science. So after I thumbed through the first few pages, I was directed towards the area of fractal geometry. I came across the 3-d mandelbrot set and found some interesting representations of its variations. Needless to say, the images I had in my head of seemingly sporadic 3-d structures come close to the way that these look.

By converting data sets and computational, systemized information sets into mathematical equations, we could find visual structures to represent them and show how they are interconnected. Since humans have a much better capacity to learn visually than with language, we would almost create a universal visual language that would represent more complex concepts. And as Dr. Wolfram poses, by putting information within the context of patterns and systems, maybe we will find that by looking at the fundamentals and the core of information that it isn't nearly as complex as we make it out to be. 

Start.

This is a blog formatted within the constraints of present technology, which has the objective of pushing those constraints away to better accommodate for the future. For the past year,  I have slowly been transitioning to new ways of thinking, moving from the analog information realm of journalism towards the digital information realm of computer science. Holistically, I feel like the world of information online has great potential to be much more systematic and interconnected than it currently is. There are so many theorems and methods being created and applied within the world of science and mathematics, but we are just entering the next era where these methods are applied universally. So much innovation has stirred in the past few decades, but it's so exciting to think that this is merely the infancy stage that is laying the foundation for a mature, interlacing, savant-like information structure.

Here's to a new era and to the next Renaissance. 

-Joanna