Ming Tu

The Clock is an interactive 3-D data visualization installation designed for the Lightbox Gallery at the Harvard Art Museums. It aims to interpret and visualize the Museumsʼ 250,000-piece collections, ranging from paintings, prints, and photographs, to sculptures, coins, and vessels, in a virtual 3-D space. Each sphere represents the year that the Museums acquire the artwork; each square shows the year that the object is created; each thread demonstrates the daily view count accumulated from exhibitions, publications, and web pages of the object; the color of each thread is determined by the predominant color found in the artwork.

This experimental project is developed for the Lightbox Gallery exhibition and Cambridge Science Festival at the Harvard Art Museums. It explores how art, technology, and data science can be combined to provide audiences innovative experiences and new insights in a museum context. The interactive visualization is programmed in Processing, and the metadata is parsed directly from the Museums' Application program interface (API). In its original setting at the gallery, the visualization is presented on a video wall, along with an implemented physical alarm clock as a physical controller for visitors to interact with the work.