pampelmoose Dave Allen of Gang of Four’s Music and Media Blog

24 hours of flights over North America as visualized by Aaron Koblin. Click to play

This motion piece is made up of a set of animations built with data from a 24-hour stretch of air travel over the United States a couple of years ago. It’s fascinating to watch how, from dawn to dusk, more and more flights appear throughout the day as the animated images sweep from east to west. These animations were created by Aaron Koblin a graphic artist and game designer as part of a project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Another fascinating set of images and animations, part of a project called Celestial Mechanics, can be found here.
In an interview with the New York Times he has this to say -

“Where one person sees the majesty of human invention, another sees the excessive gaseous waste being dumped into our skies on a daily basis (some even see it as a nationalistic tribute to our great nation). While some of these perspectives are more intended than others (not so much the latter for instance), it’s very rewarding to begin a dialogue about a system that is otherwise so intangible.

To me, the flows signify pieces of a system beyond the grasp of my mind without visual assistance. I see humanity developing systems at an accelerated pace from a component perspective, often without having any real understanding of the larger emergence. In the past it has been the job of artists to reflect on the choices being made by society, in this age of technology and global issues I see this as one approach to that task.”