Internet Art allows us to make our message visually engaging and interactive to hold your audience’s attention much more effectively than traditional media. As someone passionate about public health, Internet Art with elements of data visualization presents an exciting opportunity to make global health issues better understood by a casual audience. Our attention to a disease is often not proportional to the danger it actually poses. In response to this I want to represent the loss of life by specific illnesses by the appearance of differently colored polka dots. Each ailment will be represented as a different color, and the dots appear at the rate the disease claims lives. For example, approximately every two seconds a person dies of a heart attack, so a new dot will appear every two seconds. The dots accumulate to illustrate the scale of each illness’s impact.
“earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos” –Yayoi Kusama
My project is partially inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s use of polka dots in many of her works, as each dot is both aesthetically and symbolically significant. In the context of my project, each dot will represent a data point, which is also a human life. I hope that by visualizing the quantity of dots (lives) over time, the users will be influenced to think more deeply about the global health issues we face.
Functionally and aesthetically my project idea is also inspired by The Memory Project, which is comprised of countless dots that each represent a memory shared by a user. While my project’s dots will represent statistical data rather than user input, both represent the experience of a human being. My project will also allow the user to click on a dot to read about what it represents, in this case being a health condition and its prevalence or global burden.
The project itself will involve mostly CSS, JavaScript, P5, and some background audio. The user will initially be shown short series of messages introducing the project and its purpose. After the viewer clicks next, the screen is initially blank but begins being filled with polka dots at the rate of the ailment they represent. A counter of seconds is also displayed in the top corner as well as a simple legend at the bottom to specify which color represents which illness. Once the screen is entirely filled with dots, a closing message will appear. Programming this will require me to create different classes of polka dots that appear at a specific rate and correspond to a pop up with health information on the condition.
The visual effect will be illustrative of the pace at which illnesses claim lives and which are the biggest health challenges. The goal is for the user to come away with a more accurate understanding of the scale and impact of leading causes of death rather than presuming the most dangerous illnesses to be the ones most frequently talked about.