Terapixel Graphics

Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram have sculpted the volumetric expanse of Hall 16 of the Hannover Fairgrounds for CeBit, the world’s largest international computer expo.

A 3.000 square meter, floor-to-ceiling terapixel graphic makes manifest the largesse of Big Data, the theme of this year’s CODE_n.

For the terapixel graphics, the designers have culled and combined data sets from a vast range of sources – from Google Lab’s annals of digitised books to the morphological paths of the human mind – to create a giant, filleted panorama that both envelopes and frees the exhibition space.

Retrospective Trending (12.5 terapixel) is a 90 meter long wall-like canopy running along the western longitudinal section of the Hall 16. The varicolored scalar field of relation human knowledge, is expressed as a horizontal expanse of over 400 lexical frequency timelines from 1800 to 2008, each generated using Google’s Ngram tool.

Using Google Book’s archive of 4 billion scanned book pages, hundreds of search terms related to ethnographic themes of politics, economics, engineering, science, technology, mathematics, and philosophy resulted in the output of monumental kaleidoscopic historical trajectories of word usage over time.

Opposite is the Hydrosphere Hyperwall, (6.2 terapixel) a visualisation of the global ocean as dynamic pathways, polychrome swathes of sea climate, data-collecting swarms of mini robots and sea animals, and plumes of narrow current systems. Sinuous lines and tassels of ever-dynamic forces are layered with a cloud of directional arrows that specify wind direction. The re-imagined surface of the earth swirls alongside an exploded perpendicular web of data vectors in form of buoys, argo floats, research ships, wave gliders, sea creatures and research stations.

Alongside the Hydrosphere Hyperwall, the ultimate complex system, the Human Brain, is manifested as a terapixel resolution Human Connectome (6.6 terapixel) morphological map. Complete with several million multi-coloured fibre bundles acquired using diffusionMRIs, structural descriptions of the human mind were generated at 40 times the scale of the human body. The comprehensive 3-D map of human neural connections collapses the Mind/Brain divide with both scale and hue. Whole brain dynamics are visualised on an ultra-macro scale as well as the infinitesimal cell-scale. The resultant population of information potentiates a range of inquiries – from degenerative tissue damage in Alzheimer’s patients to the neural basis of morality.

The Big Data Vortex (9 terapixels) demarcates the far end of Hall 16 with a curved cacophony of complexity. The immersive panorama of binary maps, gel electrophoresis tracks, overlapping sine waves and geodata is mounted on a sweeping, arciform section of tubing. Driven by a monumental increase in computing power, storage, accessibility as well as the basic human compulsion to assess quantity, the techno-cultural phenomena of data is expressed undistilled in the cinema-scaled membrane. Originally conceived as an animated graphic of an ever-accelerating vector, a still frame slice of an incredibly dense information vortex suggests an infinite macro-pattern of interlocking complex systems; a dynamic, self-generated parallel universe that both humbles and hastens human progress.

Terapixel Graphics
Design: Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram