Hills we climb

2012, FutureLab Conference, Mayerhofen, Tirol

Inspired by the two phases of Project Peak 2032 at the Futurelab Conference – See the Peak and Go to the PeakHills we climb is a series of drawings suggesting landscapes that we need to climb to reach the future.

The landscapes are built by an algorithm that collects records – scientific papers, essays, news reports – about the main topics of the conference. Based on semantic analyses of this huge body of text the algorithm calculates both networks of semantic relations and weightings of words and forms terrains of the most significant clusters that emerge.

These landscapes are drawn live at the conference by the hills draw bot.

Hills we climb does neither try to visualize data as a concrete readable diagram nor wants to give an accurate quantitative representation of semantic relations but merely draws along as the algorithm finds clusters in the collected records, showing the peaks that lie ahead of us on the way to our future.