Ben Fry — Anemone

2001

Artists: Ben Fry · Year: 2001 · Medium: Live data-visualization — branching organism structure visualizing website traffic · Substrate: Processing (then in early development); live web-server logs feeding a growing branching structure · Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA · Institution: MIT Media Lab — Aesthetics and Computation Group (John Maeda) Ben Fry's Anemone (2001) is a live data-visualization produced during his graduate work at MIT Media Lab's Aesthetics and Computation Group. The piece visualizes a website's structure as a branching organism — pages are branches, links between pages are joints, and the organism grows, writhes, and reshapes itself in real time as visitors navigate the site. A heavily-trafficked site grows dense branches; a site with sparse navigation pulls itself into sparse forms. The visualization is beautiful and biologically-suggestive. Anemone is one of the canonical pieces of the early Processing era — Fry was, with Casey Reas, the co-creator of the Processing language, and Anemone is among the pieces that demonstrated what Processing could do. The visualization was shown at SIGGRAPH and at multiple museum exhibitions; it was acquired by MoMA. Fry's subsequent work — Valence (2001), the Human Genome zoomable-map visualizations, his commercial data-visualization practice at Fathom Information Design — has continued to work in the data-as-organism vein Anemone established. Fry's subsequent book Visualizing Data (O'Reilly, 2008) remains one of the best practical texts on data-visualization programming. His Fathom studio has produced data-visualization commissions for the New York Times, Nike, General Electric, and many other clients over the subsequent fifteen years. He is based in Boston. Lore Fry and Reas were simultaneously developing Processing as a teaching tool while using it for their own artistic work; Anemone was produced in roughly the same window as Processing's first public release. Fry's MIT PhD thesis (2004) documented his work on organic-structure data-visualization in substantial detail and remains a useful reference. Fathom Information Design was founded in 2010 and continues under Fry's direction. Sources • Fry, Ben — benfry.com • Fry, Ben — Computational Information Design (MIT PhD thesis, 2004) • Fry, Ben — Visualizing Data (O'Reilly, 2008)