Justus Harris joins the Maker Lab at Harold Washington Library Center for a 10-week residency, Portraits of Health Beneath Steel and Stone: 3D Printing Open City Data, from November 5 to January 16.
Harris will discuss how he turns numbers into meaningful art at our Maker in Residence introduction Saturday, November 5.
As a regular patron of the Maker Lab, Harris found a way to express his interests in art, technology and equal access through 3D printing. He transforms large sets of publicly available information about health care into 3D visualizations—sculptures that tell the story of the data through different senses and make the information more approachable.
Harris created this process using diabetes-related data to produce sculptures for individuals about their health. During his residency, Harris will expand the process to analyze health data from the South Loop and create a tactile portrait of health in the neighborhood around Harold Washington Library Center.
He'll also teach workshops in the Maker Lab explaining the process of selecting data and techniques to visualize information such as incidence of asthma and diabetes in a given neighborhood. Workshop participants will contribute to a series of health data visualizations that will ultimately form the sculpture.
Throughout his residency, Harris will invite colleagues who use 21st century technology in their work to speak at CPL about connecting learning these technologies to real-world applications.
