Faculty
Aaron Siegel is a media artist, designer, and technologist with a concentration in computational information design. His creative endeavors are inspired by interesting data sets, interfaces, and urban environments. He utilizes data visualization as a medium to explore complex systems, aiming to create aesthetically pleasing representations of data while fostering scientific empiricism. His work strives to display relationships and correlations within information systems that would remain unseen from any other perspective.
He has created work for various institutions including the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Electroland, Directed Play, the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory, Facebook and Fabrica. He has exhibited work in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Reno, Memphis, Indianapolis, Seattle, New York, Guadalajara, Madrid, Trieste, Heidelberg, Singapore, Rome, and Dubai. Siegel is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California Iovine and Young Academy for Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation.
Special Projects
Watson 2016 is a satirical political advocacy group promoting the election of the IBM Watson supercomputer to be president of the United States. The objective was to present the role of president as "the decider", collecting information and making the most informed high level decision possible. This role seems best suited for a machine that is capable of handling massive amounts of data from a variety of sources and gauging the results of analyzing that data on a myriad of metrics to weigh the impact of different decisions on the population as a whole. This is exactly the type of work that Watson was developed to do.
The site uses the iconography and navigational structure of previous presidential election websites from the 2012 campaign season to convey the image of a legitimate political web site. The intention is to blur the perception of the viewer towards uncertainty of the reality of the site or not, allowing them to momentarily suspend disbelief in order to seriously consider the possibility of a computer president. Their temporary contemplation of this scenario and the ensuing conversations that resulted through social media and blogging services allowed the concept to expand from propaganda to cultural discussion.
Petition Planet (2014) is a visualization of signature activity on the White House petition website. The interface affords the user the ability to select a specific petition from the website and watch the playback of signatures added over time, seeing the cities where signatures were coming from, an estimated gender break down of who was signing the petition, as well as a distribution of republican to democrat lean based on the 2012 presidential election results.
LIVE Singapore! (2011) provides people with access to a range of useful real-time information about their city by developing an open platform for the collection, elaboration and distribution of real-time data that reflect urban activity. Giving people visual and tangible access to real-time information about their city enables them to make their decisions more in sync with their environment, with what is actually happening around them.
After an initial process of data analysis from several data streams, six visualizations have been delineated that investigate different areas of interest and of relevance to the city of Singapore. The visualizations aim to provide greater understanding of some of the city's dynamics. This includes the real-time movement of up to 16,000 taxis moving around the country, thousands of airplanes traveling through Changi airport, thousands of container ships going through the second busiest shipping port in the world, as well as SMS messaging activity during special events.