EAGER: Field: A New Tool for Creative, Interdisciplinary Visualization of Data

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project will demonstrate that creativity enhancing tools developed initially for advanced integration of computer technology with the performing and visual arts can be effectively oriented towards demanding scientific visualization applications. Field is a software development tool developed and used by the digital art collective the OpenEnded Group in collaboration with several noted choreographers and visual artists in the integration of advanced computer technology and the performing arts. Field is a meta-authoring environment. It is an open-source programming environment that has been architected in such a way to support interdisciplinary projects that call upon domain-specific tools, libraries, and languages that has a minimal core and a powerful plug-in system. Field was created in the context of widely divergent interdisciplinary projects; its aim is to give its users not only the ability to work rapidly, but to shape their Field environment extensively and flexibly for their own demands. In this project Field software development environment will be amended to support data visualization research from the Tetherless World Constellation group in collaboration with the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. This project will benefit scientists, digital artists, and humanity scholars. Scientists will gain a powerful tool for the dissemination of scientific and technological information in areas of vital interest and thus of benefiting the public at large. By enabling better visualizations of very large-data sets, the project will help make those data-sets far more accessible and comprehensible to citizens. Since Field makes it far easier to create interactive visualizations, citizens may actively explore these complex models rather than passively receive a pre-selected set of results. Digital artists will gain a tool that provides new subject areas and canvas for making works that incorporate very large data-sets such as those of interest to the sciences and humanities including economics, scientific, demographics, medical and environmental.