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Visualize Data as Sculpture — From IoT Sensors to Art
The story of the making of a data art sculpture.
Backstory
I wasn’t hired at SAS as an artist. Until 2019, my official title was Senior User Experience (UX) Designer. As a UX designer, my job was to ensure our software (in my case data management software) was easy for our customers to use.
Although I have a BFA in painting and metalsmithing, I did not seek to become a fine artist. Instead, I focused my creative skills toward software design.
But my passion for art did play a role in drawing me to my employer. SAS is well-known for the value it places in corporate art, and I was grateful to be hired for an open position in 2014.
However, my innate curiosity led me to dream about combining my day job of dealing with data with my passion for visual art.
I began to wonder what would happen if I fed data into a piece of art.
What if we could actually make the art respond to the data? Then the piece itself would be art, but would also make a statement as visualized data.
Luckily my employer values both passion and curiosity — and I was encouraged – with the help of many SAS peers, to create a piece of digital data art. That first piece of art, called Current, visualizes the data on the SAS solar farm on the Cary campus. Learn more in this Youtube video.
Thanks to the success of that piece, in September 2019 I was asked by our COO and CTO Oliver Schabenberger to create another piece. When I was out at the solar farm, I was intrigued by the beehives that were a part of a widespread corporate sustainability effort.
Inspiration
SAS is always finding ways to inspire its employees, its customers and its community. In addition to having our own solar farm (with sheep to keep the grass down of course) we also have on-site bee hives outfitted with IoT sensors.
Bees are the lifeblood of our existence. As pollinators, bees play a part in every aspect of our ecosystem. At the most basic level, most of us understand that bees collect pollen while pollinating plants and somehow that turns into honey back at the hive.
With art, we have an opportunity to educate the public about bees beyond the basics. Using a combination of real-time hive weight, interior temperature, exterior temperature and audio data, an art piece could bring what is outside, inside.
Early on in the design process I had struggled to find a concept for the sculpture that I felt strongly about. But, with new tools come new ideas.
My son had received a 3D printer as a gift. When I saw the type of materials he was able to print, I was impressed by a single-walled vase that had interesting characteristics.
The surface was smooth like linen. Its construction, layer by layer, was something that captured my attention. At one point I turned on my iPhone light to closely inspect the vase. That’s when it hit me, single-wall 3D prints are translucent and can illuminate!
It was as if it all came rushing in at once. I clearly saw the completed sculpture in my mind.
Design and Process
My favorite part of inspiration is the rush. I feel the impulse to create something, and create it fast. My design process is very hands-on. I will often reach for traditional artist materials before I refine an idea on a computer. I took what I had at hand: printer paper, glue sticks, cotton balls, wooden skewers, and Styrofoam.
Keeping the image of a sun-kissed field in the forefront of my mind, I created a 3D sketch from these materials. This simple sketch helped me make several important decisions.
The light shades couldn’t be random in height, they needed to follow a parametric curve. The top of the parametric curve where all the light would be needed to be close to or at eye level. The width of the piece needed to be an impressive 18 feet long. The depth of the piece needed to be about 24 inches.
Now that I had my concept, I couldn’t walk into the executive meeting room with cotton balls and skewers. I needed a polished proposal. I also needed a budget.
While drafting my proposal, several other important details were fleshed out.
What tech would light this? How would I control the lights with data? What SAS® software was needed to tap into the real-time sensor data? What would the light designs look like? What would the base structure look like that connected all the electronics?
My proposal to the executive team included answers to all these questions. Once the project was approved and I had a budget, the real work began.
Building the Sculpture
SAS has an incredibly giving workforce. If you ask for help you will get it. This is not only true of this project but it is true of all projects at SAS. If you get stuck, and can’t find an expert by word of mouth, there is an internal project marketplace where you can find someone in the company to help.
SAS has an amazing on-site Art and Scenic Operations department. That allowed me to collaborate with a group of creatives with an unparalleled depth of knowledge in how to model and build things.
I also collaborated with a data scientist, a development engineer and a creative coder. Each one elevated the project with their passion and ideas. They cared about the sculpture as much as I did, and that’s a gift for which I will be forever grateful.
Before construction could begin, the sculpture had to be rendered in 3D to gain a better understanding of what it would eventually look like. Riley Benson, SAS Principal User Experience Designer and co-artist, took sketches and drawings I provided and turned it into a 3D model we could use for design iterations.
Once we had a good idea of what our base structure was going to look like, we handed it off to Senior Event Design Project Manager Mike Fry, to design the cabinetry using SolidWorks — a 3D parametric modeling software.
When the cabinetry design process began, we realized that there were new challenges to solve. Due to its massive size (18 feet long), it needed to be built as three, six-foot long sections. This decision allowed us to use standard building materials, and easily transport it to venues using rolling storage crates. On site, the three sections needed to be able to be bolted together with power and network lines routing back the center section.
This was a complicated system and lot of emphasis was placed on making it easy to repair. For example, we had to plan easy access to the electrical and networking components in case something needed to be fixed or swapped out on-site at an event. This was solved by adding an access lid with concealed hinges to each of the three cabinets. The access lids turned out to be quite heavy, so we added gas struts as lift assists. Now they open more easily than the hood of your car.
When the design was complete and the cabinets were ready for fabrication, the project was handed over to the build team.
Senior Artisan and Designer Mike Weiss cut out all of the plywood and aluminum parts on the in-house CNC router. Brandon Watkins (also an artisan and designer) prepared the aluminum rods and mount system. Artisan and Designer Robert Stone assembled the cabinets and applied the dark walnut laminate.
Robert took great care to ensure the three sections fit together as one cohesive piece. Because the top is made up of two layers (for increased stability of the rods) each layer had to be perfectly aligned. Even if it was just a tiny bit off, the rods wouldn’t be perpendicular to the base. Any misalignments had to be corrected, otherwise it would appear to be a mistake.
When the base structure was close to completion, things suddenly felt more real. This was the first time we could get a feel for how big this sculpture was going to be.
I designed six cohesive light shade designs for 3D printing while the base was under construction. In total, the structure comprises 280 lights. Many iterations were necessary to arrive at six unique, but related, shade designs. I found out the hard way that a shade design might look great in a 3D rendering application, but it’s a whole different story once you start playing with real light. Shadowed or dark areas within the shade were only visible once the design had been printed and illuminated.
3D printing requires a lot of finesse. I had thought that printing would go quickly once the shade designs were created. This was not the case.
Each design had to be printed one at a time. Groups caused too many issues with thin plastic threads that would float in the air and stick to the hot printing nozzle. Each single print took roughly four hours to complete and each of the six designs was printed 50 times. 50 x 6 = 300. 300 tops x 4 hours… you can see where I’m going with the math.
Printing flawless shades is a lot harder than it looks. I could write an entire article alone on the challenges of printing 300 flawless forms that are illuminated by light.
Within each of these 3D printed shades is an addressable LED. Each section of the sculpture is controlled with a FadeCandy USB controlled-driver. Three hundred cables (each with four wires within them) that were soldered to the LEDs and fed through an anodized aluminum rod down to the underside of the access lid.
The electrical work hidden below was almost a form of art itself. I was very concerned about getting it perfect, so I did it myself.
Even though the electrical work was repetitive and gave me a wicked case of tennis elbow, I enjoyed this part more than I expected. I wanted to make the electrical work underneath look as good as the art above.
Every rod that is seated in the base of the sculpture is a unique length. Senior Event Design Project Manager Thomas Richardson devised a rack system for the rods that was clear and easy to understand. It was impossible to mess up, which made assembly quick and painless.
When the wiring step began, we learned quickly that the best way to work was to have the lids secured upright on a workbench. This made it much easier to access both sides of the lid without any strain on the body. The 3D shades were also installed at this time.
Bringing Presence to life
Art is approachable, and it evokes curiosity and emotion. When you inject data into it, it lets people approach hard topics in delightful and meaningful ways. It provides an opportunity to create a dialogue around topics that might otherwise be intimidating, like big data or analytics. Anybody can appreciate it. You don’t have to know data science or statistics or machine learning or AI to benefit from what’s going on.
It takes software to transform data into an art piece. Building software that applies artistic techniques to express a concept through digital or other mediums is known as “creative coding.”
Despite the lighthearted name, creative coding requires complex coding to avoid performance bottlenecks and to design algorithms. Incorporating dynamic data into the project adds another layer of complexity.
When a single person is providing the artistic direction and writing the code, most of the iteration is happening as the software is built. But for teams where artists and developers collaborate, there is a stronger motivation for the software to allow tweaking without coding knowledge. This inspired us to think of the project not just as building an art installation, but as building a tool or even a platform for data art.
Riley Benson and Software Designer Darien Pardinas Diaz collaborated to build custom software to drive the LED array. It allows for tweaking the generated effects in real time and is based on the OpenFrameworks project, a popular library of software made for creative coders. It’s our hope that we can continue to refine and build more data art on the foundations we have started.
I worked with Data Scientist Nancy Rausch to determine how to collect the data we needed. Nancy has inspired me on many projects, and I’ve found talking with a data scientist to be an essential part of the creative process.(Artists should talk with data scientists a lot more and vice versa. I highly recommend it!)
Nancy used SAS to combine data from multiple sources:
- Hourly weather data from the Reedy Creek weather station NOAA (National Oceanic and Administrative) website.
- Data collected via SAS® Event Stream Processing to collect bee hive temperature and weights.
- Web data collected on http://cloud.beedata.com , which contains some processed information such as differences between samples pre-calculated.
SAS/ACCESS®, DATA step, and PROC SQL combine the data together. A combination of SAS® Data Preparation, SAS® Data Quality, and SAS® Studio were used to cleanse the data. SAS® Visual Statistics was used to build a forecast model. After trying several models, an exponential smoothing model was chosen as the champion model.
Once the data was prepared for the sculpture, it moved over to the custom software Riley and Darien created, which communicated with the FadeCandy driver resulting in the light display we see today.
Even though viewers can benefit from the data without knowing the mapping, a key describes what they are seeing.
Beehive weight is driving the main light area position along the sculpture. The left side of the sculpture represents a heavier weight and the right side represents a lighter weight. The active beehive is mapped to the hue being used. Four beehives, four hues. Changes in beehive weight drives the bee travel direction (smaller lights either traveling into or out of the main light area). Internal vs. external temperature maps to the rate of a pulsing kind of transition between the two hues for each hive. Residual from the forecasted weight vs. actual is mapped to how erratic the bee movement is. External temperature is mapped to the base speed of the bee movement.
Art and data together can foster meaningful relationships between people and information. It becomes something a person can experience, walk around, look at and sometimes touch. This kind of novel or unexpected sensory experience can help people tap in to a more intuitive understanding of data. It can help bring to life what was previously just a number on a spreadsheet. The general intent of the sculpture is to give the viewer a sense of connection to the data.
Symbolism
Our daily lives are made up of many moments, some of which we stop and savor and others we soon forget. This art piece is inspired by one of those moments: early in the morning as the sun catches the edges of tall grass. It is in this moment, as we slow ourselves down, that we experience the gift of our natural surroundings.
For me, Presence is an ambient display with the purpose of calling your attention to these fragile moments.
It allows us to tell a data story through art.
Artists Jessica Peter & Riley Benson
Data Scientist Nancy Rausch
Engineering & Coding Darien Pardinas Diaz
Art and Scenic Operations Jim Utley, Michael Fry, Robert Stone, Thomas Richardson, Brandon Watkins, Mike Weiss, Erin Morales, Jarrod Gross, Juliana Craig, Pete Sack
LED Electrical Design and 3D Printing Gregory Peter
