Andreas Nicolas Fischer – ‘A week in the life’ Data Sculpture

Made partly in a Generator.x 2.0 workshop, Andreas Nicolas Fischer’s ‘A week in the life’ is a three dimensional visualisation of movement and communication made with a cell phone during a week roaming around Berlin. Using bespoke software written for his mobile phone, Andreas was able to record the longitude and latitude of his position in the city. The data was then passed to a Processing sketch, which resulted in the 3D representation. WMMNA extracted the following info regarding the journey from Processing to final data sculpture:

‘The model was then taken into Rhino and contoured into horizontal and vertical 2d layers. The intersections were set and vectors cleaned in illustrator. After that individual parts were cut with a laser cutter and assembled into the final work’

The density of the cell sites reflect the speed and frequency of movement within the city. The more often Andreas visited a place, the more cell sites were added to the map. Aside from the aesthetics, the work was aimed at making people aware of the German telecommunications data retention act (Vorratsdatenspeicherung) which requires the telecommunications providers to collect the connection data of all customers. This is a good example of the confluence of two growing areas of interests within the computational art scene, abstract data visualisation and digital fabrication.