Recently I have been working with Gautam Agarwal, a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley, on a piece for the Mind Matters show next Spring at UCSF. His work is focused on understanding the relationship between spatial awareness and neural activity. He has been teaching me about his research and I have been developing data visualization tools in Processing to view and navigate through the massive data sets he is using:

OpenGL in Processing has allowed us to visualize hundred of thousands of data points, animate them, rotate them in three dimensions, and change parameters in real time. In the visualization below, color represents spatial positioning and the height of the curves represent neural activity, showing clear connections between the two variables:

We don’t yet have a vision of what this all becomes for the show, but we are developing a large cache of materials to work with.

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Last Spring, avatar internet artist LaTurbo Avedon visited my Internet Tools class at SFAI. It was certainly the most unorthodox guest speaker I’ve had visit a class. Check out her intro video and then check out her projects, both of which are great.