Seed Media Group: Blog

BEN FRY: Seed Visualization is the client side of things, the Phyllotaxis Lab the research and internal side. For example, for the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January, we developed a piece that depicted connections between the different sessions at the conference – there were 180 of them – through various keywords found in their descriptions.

General Electric was another recent client where we wanted to show how the company was involved in healthcare and to show the kinds of things we can learn from healthcare. [The online project visualises the links between gender and age, and a range of illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes].
For the Lab side, this is where we want to push the state of the art a bit, and pursue our interests without the constraints of a client project. The idea is that research and speculative work helps feed ideas for other projects. In the past I’ve found that if I work too much on the practical side, or too far on the purely aesthetic side, the results really suffer. You have to pursue a mixture of both. My Disarticulate piece – a pair of prints, one of which showed the results of a virtual inter pretation of another art piece by Casey Reas – came along during one of these periods. It also sometimes coincides with when I’ll work on a show or exhibition of some sort.

CR: What’s the overall aim, or purpose of visualising all this data?

BF: The personal answer is that it’s just what I’m curious about. I enjoy finding things out, building things that help me make sense out of a complex idea, and being able to see that once it’s done. So for instance, if I read about the H1N1 ‘swine flu’ virus, how it has travelled to 89 countries, and how the virus has continued to evolve, I immediately want to start building something that actually shows that phenomenon. How much has the virus evolved? What does that look like on the dna level? Can we track its changes across the globe? How can we see the progression of the pandemic? I’ve been lucky to be able to pursue this sort of thing and make a living from it.