Wind Map is “a living portrait of of the wind currents over the U.S.”, conceived and developed as a side-project by the data visualization super-team of Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, who lead Google’s Big Picture visualization research group (and before that, IBM’s Visual Communication Lab).

This beautiful, perpetually-animated online ap pulls publicly available data of surface wind speeds from the National Digital Forecast Database, which is updated hourly. The map shows the patterns created by winds ranging from 1-30 miles-per-hour. Pan and zoom functionality allows observation in fine detail.

Of the project, the artists write: “It conveys the movement of the air in the most basic way: with visual motion. As an artwork that reflects the real-world, its emotional meaning changes from day to day. On calm days it can be a soothing meditation on the environment; during hurricanes it can become ominous and frightening.”

Also be sure to check out the site’s gallery of archived map images.

More of Martin and Fernanda’s data viz collaborations can be found here.

Thanks to Emilio Gomariz, I’ll never look at OS X the same.

Happening now, through February 5th, 2012. On Medicine Lake in Plymouth, MN.

The fabulously quirky Art Shanty Projects, is a four-week-long exhibition that is part sculpture park, part artist residency and part social experiment. It is an artist driven temporary community exploring the ways in which the relatively unregulated public space of the frozen lake can be used as a new and challenging artistic environment to expand notions of what art can be.

Art Shanty Projects is an homage to the uniquely Minnesotan pastime of ice fishing in a well-equipped and creatively-executed shack. Dotting the state’s lakes in winter, anglers set up shelter, bore through the ice, set up their poles and propane heaters, then sit around playing cards, drinking beer and laughing the whole night long. Sounds like fun, right?

With names/themes such as “The Shanty of Wonder”, “Monsters Under the Bed Shanty”, “SitandSpinShanty”, “Fort Shanty” and “Robot Reprise”, the Art Shanties provide a unique opportunity for artists to interact with their audience, and vice versa, in an un-intimidating, non-gallery like environment. Artists can choose to work in a way that directly engages the audience, or in a more passive way.

Previously an annual exhibition, from the 2012 season it will run biennially, potentially changing to a new Twin Cities-area lake every two years.

“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetic euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death.

Design, engineering: Julijonas Urbonas
Health issues: Dr. Michael Gresty, Spatial Disorientation Lab, Imperial College, London
Model making: Paulius Vitkauskas
Photography: Aistė Valiūtė and Daumantas Plechavičius

If you need a little break from all this serious design, head over to Friends of Type where this week they’re hosting a lettering battle between 5 talented gals and 5 talented gents.

Dogboarding from DANIELS on Vimeo.

New archival 280gsm giclée fiber-prints from Givan Lötz exploring and decoding the transcendental aesthetic.

All religions have an ecstatic component and all involve altering human consciousness to some extent by prayer, meditation, chanting, dancing, fasting etc. Although belief in a non-physical spiritual realm has diminished as part of our post-darwinian age it has not disappeared. Even those who have relinquished their belief are prone, if not compelled, to seek out substitutes. The altered states associated with Sex (orgasm), Drugs (intoxication), Madness (psychosis) are not only substitutes for religious experience but in some instances accomplices to these mystical practices.

To Whom It May Concern: (TWIMC) is an interactive installation which functions as a metaphor for a software application, programmed by Michelle Son, in which the user experience is recreated in a real-time physical space. Having control over the functions and features built into the application, users are invited to step into the programme to explore the features and visual effects by using their sense of smell, touch, sight and sound. Based on the simulated templates of Microsoft Word, users are immersed in a hyper real office environment where the virtual becomes tactile and the template is embellished. Watch the Movie.

Pretty stunning photography from Justin Quinnell. These shots are the result of a 6 month long exposure taken with pinhole coke can cameras attached to telephone poles around Bristol, England. The streaking effect is the sun’s trajectory from winter solstice to summer solstice. Via iso50.

The great people over at Thirst are kind of obsessed with Chicago’s former governor. He’s like a train wreck you can’t look away from, or that obnoxiously cute kitten video with a billion hits. So they designed two shirts in his honor. Bleepin’ Golden commemorates these famous words “I’ve got this thing, and it’s bleepin’ golden,” and Blagito features the mugshot of Chicago’s bandit-of-the-moment – Blago in bandit wear.

They’ll be sold for $20 a piece for a limited time on thirstore
No matter how the trial turns out, we’ll always have Blago’s memorable words.