IT鈥檚 easy to forget that at any moment thousands of planes are criss-crossing the globe, tracing out complex traffic patterns wherever they go.
Aaron Koblin, a media artist at the University of California, Los Angeles, gathered the traffic data about planes flying over the US in a typical 24 hours and turned it into a dynamic work of art that says something new about the beauty and emotion of patterns generated by even the most mechanical of objects.
The image above, Flight Patterns, is a screen shot from the resulting animation. Koblin used data provided by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) tracking the flights of up to 19,000 planes. Each frame captures the number of planes in the air at a particular moment, using different colours and line styles to represent different planes.
Advertisement
The paths of the planes mirror the topography of the land below, so the shape of the US emerges, with dense patches of converging lines pinpointing major cities and air-traffic hubs. The animation is part of a larger project called Celestial Mechanics, an installation designed to be displayed in a planetarium dome, where instead of gazing at shooting stars or other natural phenomena, visitors experience the wonders of a man-made sky.
Koblin has a background in computer science and is fascinated by statistics. 鈥淚n the field of science, there is a constant striving to maintain objectivity and sterility, which disguises much of the innate beauty of existence,鈥� he says. Flight Patterns reveals that there is beauty and complexity even in such an unpromising activity as commercial aviation. Making visible the sheer number of swarming machines that are usually invisible from the ground is a startling experience.
Koblin鈥檚 work brought him a tied first prize in the media art category of the 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, run by the National Science Foundation and Science magazine. You can visit the artist鈥檚 website at .
