Revelatory Media: New York Talk Exchange
by Imran Ali
Earlier this month I dropped into the Emerging Arts Fest at O’Reilly’s seminal ETech 2008 conference; the arts fest brought together a number of projects at the ‘intersection between art, design and technology. One of the most striking pieces on show was MIT’s New York Talk Exchange, part of the school’s Sensable City lab.
The NYTE project is mining real-time communications data from AT&T and visualising IP traffic and telephony flows between New York and the rest of the world, handily expressing the relationships between New Yorkers and the globe, even down to various ethnically biased neighbourhoods mapping directly onto countries of origin and the temporal dynamics of calls across multiple time zones.
NYTE is nothing short of a breathtaking technical and aesthetic achievement, though it’d be interested to utilise these visualisations to explore a finer level of granularity, notably where mobility and messaging intersect with more general IP and telephony traffic.
Complex data visualisations are almost always pretty, but their real profundity is as ‘revelatory media’; what can we learn, what questions can be answered that previously could not; what is serendipitously revealed?
What would NYTE look like around 9/11? We’d expect to see blackspots around Lower Manhattan, but would we see a sudden switch from voice to SMS are networks were overwhelmed? Would we see a sudden uptick of calls between Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Boston prior to the attacks?
Though not the first MIT project to explore these themes, NYTE is certainly the most polished - what can such visualisation tell us about the motivation and ethnography of communication and messaging?
