Creative Code Fellowship: Water Works Proposal
Along with 3 other new media artists and creative coding experts, I was recently selected to be a Creative Code Fellow for 2014 — a project pioneered by Gray Area (formerly referred to as GAFFTA and now in a new location in the Mission District).
Each of us is paired with a partnering studio, which provides a space and creative direction for our proposed project. The studio that I’m pleased to be working with is Stamen Design, a leader in the field of aesthetics, mapping and data-visualization.
I’ll be also continuing my residency work at Autodesk at Pier 9, which will be providing support for this project as well.
My proposed project is called “Water Works” — a 3D-printed data visualization of San Francisco’s water system infrastructure, along with some sort of web component.
Creative Code Fellowship Application Scott Kildall
Project Proposal (250 limit)
My proposed project “Water Works” is a 3D data visualization of the complex network of pipes, aqueducts and cisterns that control the flow of water into our homes and out of our toilets. What lies beneath our feet is a unique combined wastewater system — where stormwater mixes with sewer lines and travels to a waste treatment plant, using gravitational energy from the San Francisco hills.
This dynamic flow is the circulatory system of the organism that is San Francisco. As we are impacted by climate change, which escalates drought and severe rainstorms, combined with population growth, how we obtain our water and dispose of it is critical to the lifeblood of this city.
Partnering with Autodesk, which will provide materials and shop support, I will write code, which will generate 3D prints from municipal GIS data. I imagine ghost-like underground 3D landscapes with thousands of threads of water — essentially flow data — interconnected to larger cisterns and aqueducts. The highly retinal work will invite viewers to explore the infrastructure the city provides. The end result might be panels that snap together on a tabletop for viewers to circumnavigate and explore.
The GIS data is available, though not online, from San Francisco and already I’ve obtained cooperation from SFDPW about providing some infrastructure data necessary to realize this project.
While my focus will be on the physical portion of this project, I will also build an interactive web-based version from the 3D data, making this a hybrid screen-physical project.
Why are you interested in participating in this fellowship? (150 word limit)
The fellowship would give me the funding, visibility and opportunity of working under the umbrage of two progressive organizations: Gray Area and Stamen Design. I would expand my knowledge, serve the community and increase my artistic potential by working with members of these two groups, both of which have a progressive vision for art and design in my longtime home of San Francisco.
Specifically, I wish to further integrate 3D printing into the data visualization conversation. With the expertise of Stamen, I hope to evolve my visualization work at Autodesk. The 3D-printing technology makes possible what has hitherto been impossible to create and has enormous possibilities to materialize the imaginary.
Additionally some of the immersive classes (HTML5, Javascript, Node.js) will be helpful in solidifying my web-programming skills so that I can produce the screen-based portion of this proposal.
What experience makes this a good fit for you? (150 word limit)
I have deep experience in producing both screen-based and physical data visualizations. While at the Exploratorium, I worked on many such exhibits for a general audience.
One example is a touch-screen exhibit called “Seasons of Plankton”, which shows how plankton species in the Bay change over the year, reflecting a diverse ecosystem of microscopic organisms. I collaborated with scientists and visitor evaluators to determine the optimal way to tell this story. I performed all of the coding work and media production for this successful piece.
While at Autodesk, my focus has been creating 3D data visualizations with my custom code that transforms public data sets into “Data Crystals” (these are the submitted images). This exploration favors aesthetics over legibility. I hope to build upon this work and create physical forms, which help people see the dynamics of a complex urban water system to invite curiosity through beauty.
