Jer Thorp
Bio
Jer Thorp is an artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada. A former geneticist, his digital art practice explores the many-folded boundaries between science and art.
Thorp's award-winning software-based work has been exhibited in Europe, Asia, North America, South America, and Australia and all over the web.
Recently, he has produced work for WIRED UK, written for The Guardian, and been featured by the New York Times Developer Network. Jer is currently artist in residence at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and is an instructor in New York University's renowned ITP program.
Jer is a contributing editor for WIRED UK.
Session
Hacking the Newsroom
In February, the New York Times announced that it was giving away the keys to 28 years of data - news stories, movie reviews, obituaries, and political statistics - all for free. Wether the dying gasp of an legendary institution, or the beginnings of an extraordinary rebirth, the release of this vast and historically significant information is a boon to data visualizers, entrepreneurs, social scientists and artists around the world.
In this session, Jer will show a variety of work that he has produced using data from The New York Times and The Guardian newspapers. He'll show how to access this information easily in Flash and Processing, and will share code samples to get you started in explorations of your own. Along the way, he'll attempt to examine how a new era of open data is affecting science, art, and design.