Visualizing the Invisible

ABC World News with Charles Gibson featured the following video in a segment last night. I got on the Web tonight and found it on YouTube and decided to share it here.

Ever wondered how many planes are in the sky at any given moment? What does the FAA see when they track all the planes that are in the sky on any given day?

Using 2005 data from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Aaron Koblin and a team from of the Department of Design/Media Arts at UCLA created this amazing animation and others that visualize for us what the flight patterns of planes en route to and from U.S. Airports look like each day.

This is a great example of using technology to see the “unseen” and of blurring the boundaries between time and space. I can see using this video in the classroom to make connections between art, science, and geography. It could be used to discuss the role of the artist and scientist in “visualizing the invisible” or “seeing the unseen,” and how using these two lenses present us with different views of our world.

As a follow-up activity, you could ask your students to “Design an instrument or method to map something invisible” or to “Make a map of something you cannot see.”

For more information on this project as well as Quicktime videos that you can download to show in the classroom, see Flight Patterns.