Spirals are EVERYWHERE!

It's amazing how your subconscious focuses in on something after it's been exposed to an idea. It's the kind of phenomena that means as soon as you buy a new car or dye your hair a new colour, you start seeing the same car/hair colour everywhere you look. The simple fact is that they've probably been around you for a while and you just haven't noticed until it was relevant to your life. This is what has happened to me since I started looking at the Fibonacci series and mandala patterns. I'm now noticing spirals and patterns everywhere.
In uni last week we had a guest lecture from Brendan Dawes, who tries his hand at a variety of different mediums and styles. I really liked some of his work; his happiness machine is exactly what I think art should be, entertaining and there to make people happy. It's his work for EE however which captured my attention in relation to my project. He created a way of visualising links in Twitter over 3 days and 11 different cities as part of their promotional campaign. His final design is based on the formation of sunflower seeds on the flower, but he uses different sized and coloured dots as a code for the Tweets, which gives the effect of a sporadic mandala pattern.
I absolutely love it when data is visualised by artists, hence the reason I'm so into maths for this project. My flatmate owns a book called 'Information is Beautiful', which is a collection of innovative ways of presenting data. I think Dawes' EE Digital City Portraits could easily be a part of the book, as it has made millions of tweets digestible in just a few beautiful images. I particularly love how one of the images shows an influx of tweets from the London area regarding a hurricane in New York, and the formation of Dawes' images reflects the structure of a hurricane as it follows the same Fibonacci spiral - a lucky, unintended stroke of brilliance in the work due to the data that came through.
http://brendandawes.com/projects/ee