Visualizing our Humanity

Artist Aaron Koblin takes vast amounts of data -- and at times vast numbers of people -- and weaves them into stunning visualizations. From elegant lines tracing airline flights to landscapes of cell phone data, from a Johnny Cash video assembled from crowd-sourced drawings to the "Wilderness Downtown" video that customizes for the user, his works brilliantly explore how modern technology can make us more human.

Blending fantasy and reality, this animated short is a bold inquiry into an as yet unresolved problem - the nature of human identity. When a scientist creates a machine that can make copies of physical objects including humans, a number of ethical questions arise. Is the technique moral? What of its safety? A film by Oscar-winning filmmaker John Weldon (who also wrote the catchy banjo tune that punctuates the story's changing moods.)

Arthur Ganson  makes machines. This machine was inspired by watching a randomly shaped object bouncing off the surface of a slow moving, reciprocating and irregularly shaped piston head on the moon. Of course anything is possible in the virtual world of the computer. The doll house chair seems to be the perfect object to bounce nearly weightlessly over the unsuspecting cat. In this machine, the chair is passive and all motion is due to interference by the cat. The large disk at the back serves to both counterbalance the arm and give more mass to the chair itself. The motion of the chair is complex and will never repeat. (Margot Clark was Arthur Ganson's wonderful and inspiring art history teacher at the University of New Hampshire. When she passed away she left a houseful of cats.)