traceNorth

2010

TraceNorth is a data visualisation public art work by Brigitta Zics and Tom Schofield that re-image the city’s life through organic representation of traffic data. The project was commissioned by the Northern Stage in collaboration with Culture Lab as part of the Northern Stage’s 40th Birthday celebration project. TraceNorth is a data visualisation project which reinterprets traffic flow of the city of Newcastle into visual representations of constantly transforming organic shapes. This representation re-imagines the city as a living organism of movement and human presence rather than simply showing the activity of traffic cycles.

Traffic congestion data drives the shape and size of the individual arms of each organic shape that are linked to a particular location of the city represented by the map structure of each object. The data was collected by the school of Civil Engineering and Geosciences’ Transport Operations Research Group at Newcastle University in collaboration with Newcastle City Council and represents one single day of traffic information of the city.

Brigitta Zics and Tom Schofield were artists in-residence at Culture Lab/Newcastle University, they're research explored the aesthetic values of visualisation and how such qualities make data more accessible anf immersive.