psemme

To me, moments in life, each individual minute, even second, that goes by is made more meaningful via thoughtful observation. This attention is mainly qualitative but it occasionally get quantified – think pictures, videos, etc. My notion of a transient takes the quantification idea to its logical extreme, arguing that the actual measurement of existence is the definition of your life. All of my creative output over the past couple of years has been informed by this belief, viewpoint, perspective.

Notarists are a great example of how transients can have practical value, albeit in a creative way. Since a Notarist is a documenter of existence, it made sense to me that there could/should be some examples of “transient documentation” – hence the “transient graph” was born. It’s a graphical template for displaying the basic spacetime data required of a transient – latitude, longitude, altitude, date, time. Of course, there are countless ways this can be illustrated graphically, and I will continue to explore the options, but this was my first attempt and I’m happy with it.

The layout is meant to be fairly self-explanatory and it if you stare at it for a couple mins I think you’ll agree. The main graphical language trick is – the solid icons are whole numbers and the partial icons represent decimal places/numbers.

Once you get used to the layout, you start to notice patterns that quickly tell you if the location is east or west, north or south of Greenwich, England. I like this first iteration and will continue to evolve it.