Miska Knapek’s work in information visualisation is settled somewhere in between science and art. His Windtracing piece draws the story of the wind’s movement, taking place in Helsinki over one week (Sept 6-12, 2007). The introduction to Knapek’s work starts OK Do’s Science poems project. Following the traditional mindset of science fiction, Science poems recognises and investigates the poetry of science rather than its mathematical logic.
“It’s a memento of a friend’s stay in the city, brought to life via the Finnish Meteorological Institute’s weather sensors, which got me in touch with the wind and helped me visually narrate its hidden life,” Knapek explains. His tools are all open source: Python programming language is used to process the data from the weather sensors which is then visualised in Processing.
Knapek traces the path of the wind with a pencil-thin grey line (top right in the video), moving in the same direction with the wind, and with proportionally similar velocity. The larger line shows a close-up revealing the wind’s more intimate movements. About two hours of wind movement is retold every second.
As in science, Knapek strives to provide answers to issues concerning the world, producing an overview of something in a smaller or a larger scale so that the viewer can see and understand the phenomenon more extensively. And like art, his projects strive to inspire questions. “With information visualisation as my way of looking at the world, I’m starting to go from mostly being interested in its form to mostly being interested in the content,” he says.
Today, there is not only more complexity in the world to be understood, but also the possibility of understanding more as a greater amount of life is recorded digitally. And while the world is experienced more and more in the now, we easily start focusing on single instants and lose perspective. “Sometimes, it’s good to take a view of the world from further aback,” Knapek states. “I believe that data is the new journalistic raw material of the 21st century and information visualisation is the citizen journalist’s tool for retelling what’s going on in the world.”
In addition to a piece of personal history, Windtracing presents nature as a living organism, interrelated to a person with a pencil and paper. “Visualising the environment gives us an insight into its functioning, bringing it closer to our understanding and everyday contemplations – and, at the very least, resulting in more meaningful conversations around the weather,” Knapek concludes.