Brendan Dawes
The Art of Form and Code

Data as Object

Data you can hold in your hands

What if you could bump into data? What if you could hold data in your hands as easily as holding a cup?

These objects are created using the data from my Twitter archive. The teal coloured cubes illustrate my Twitter activity from 2008, 2010 and 2012. You can see that when I first joined Twitter I wasn't sure what it was, or how to use it. The 2008 cube is only slightly punctuated with activity. Jump ahead to 2012 and the change is stark - now there is lots of activity represented by the undulation of spikes across the surface of the cube.

The orange grid like structures – or as I like to call them Data Waffles – show 2008 versus 2012. Again the difference between activity can not only be seen but also felt.

These are experiments; playful disruptions that try to explore how to make physical things from digital data. Have you bumped into any data today?