LA-based artist Refik Anadol has turned the media wall of the 350 Mission Building in San Francisco into otherworldly digital sculptures. The public art work is called Virtual Depictions and uses parametric data from the city to create the stunning visuals.
To do this Anadol used publicly available frozen datasets — on everything from transportation to city management, museum data and housing —put online by the city of San Francisco as part of their open data portal initiative SF OpenData. Meant for developers, analysts, residents, and whoever else wants to use it, Anadol combined it with Twitter’s real-time API service.
The frozen sets of civic data and pedestrians on the urban streetscape are combined with the real-time geolocated Twitter tags — and 3D point cloud data — fed through toolkit VVVV and various software including Cinema4D, Rhino, and Softimage XSI, to create dynamic visuals that are never the same twice.