Futuresonic

Flight Patterns is a data visualisation project that precisely traces the path of airline flights in the United States in colour and form. The result is a stunning visual animation of the path of the thousands of aircraft in American airspace during a single day.

Aviation is a symbol of globalisation and one of the drivers of climate change. Flight Patterns was based on 24 hours worth of airplane tracking data provided by the Federal Aviation Administration and developed using open source programming language. Flight Patterns was originally developed as a series of experiments for the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne and was awarded a National Science Foundation award for Science Visualisation.

Aaron Koblin - "Every three minutes I received locations of flight routes and interpolated those values to create an animation of where every plane is flying. I was interested in seeing the way 'Flight Patterns' kind of slices up the country waking up, going to sleep and moving around. You can see the ebb and flow as plane routes erupt on the East Coast in the morning, flow over to the West Coast and eventually to Hawaii."

Biography

Aaron Koblin is an artist, designer and researcher focused on creating and visualising human systems. Currently working out of San Francisco, California, Aaron creates software and architectures to transform social and infrastructural data into artworks. Koblin's work has been shown internationally and is part of the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

www.aaronkoblin.com