As part of my graduate thesis at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), A Shift in the Fabric is both an installation and software platform. In both spaces, A Shift is an exploration into individual network structures and topologies, their placement in geo-spatial mapping, and the study of their visual aesthetics towards a better understanding of them in a design context.
The basic building blocks of a network visualization are nodes (points in space or time) and edges (the lines connecting them). The combination of these simple shapes can detail the most complicated of relationships. A Shift in the Fabric aimed to not only show how those relationships can be expanded between the simple objects and their inter-relationships, but also to explore how multiple overlaid networks with shared nodes can be explored together, to further understand the complexities and synergies these overlapping relationships have with each other.
Much of this research is built on by the events of Hurricane Katrina. In viewing the aftermath of that natural disaster in New Orleans in a trip November of 2005, and my longtime love of dystopian narratives, I built these tools as a way to understand layered infrastructures in geo-spatial environments. How do you visualize multiple layers of complexity? What happens if one of those layers is impacted, harmed, or destroyed by some force? Does building an aesthetic frameworks for these layers help us see the impacts one layer has on another? These are a handful of the questions I wanted to begin to understand and perhaps answer.