View piece: Here
Whale Stars is a piece that was influenced by the idea that once someone dies they become a star in the sky. This piece was a project for my computing arts class final. I came across an article on whaling which stressed how Norway, Japan and Iceland have been prime contributors to whale deaths yearly. While I understand that whales are endangered and we should not encourage people to hunt them I was offset by the tone of the article. It seems as if they were putting all the blame for the endangerment of the whale species on these three countries which annoyed me. I feel as if society fails to realize the origin of the decimation of the whale population was due to western society using whale blubber for oil in the 19th – 20th century. As a result I wanted to shed light on whaling but also note that I was motivated by the narrow minded journal article that, in a way, reflects the thoughts of western society.
Data was gathered from the International whaling commission total catches data frame. The data was then imported into a google doc in order to access the data. However, I had trouble with the code and had to hardcode the numbers.
The project features a timeline on the bottom from the years 1985-1999. Users are able to scroll through the timeline in order to see the amount of whales that passed away that year due to whaling practices. Each whale displayed on the screen represents 100 whales and their position is generated randomly across the screen.
Progress sketches
