Description
Future Times is a data sculpture created in collaboration with Casey Alt. The work consists of a stack of 100 15 inch-square acrylic plates with each plate representing one year from 1908 to 2008. Each plate has 100 holes that correspond to the top 100 most frequent noun phrases associated with the phrase "in the future" for each year according to Google News Archive, Google Scholar, and Google Blog search results. The diameter of each hole varies with the relative frequency of each term. For example, in the plate for 1945, the hole for the term "war" has a large diameter since many people were making predictions about the future of warfare. The plates are each 3/8" thick and are stacked vertically on top of 4 small plastic supports with the oldest plate (1908) at the bottom and the most recent one (2008) on the top. The entire height of the piece (with supports) is 40". A horizontal beam of white light randomly walks up and down one side of the sculpture, illuminating one plate at a time.
