Representing three days in March 2005, Aaron Koblin took United States FAA air traffic data and developed a series of beautiful animations. [Neatorama]

This work was originally developed as a series of experiments for the project “Celestial Mechanics” by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne at UCLA. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.

The color-coded aircraft animation (QT) is so amazing that it’s now a poster.

Also: Check out his other project, The Sheep Market. Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system, he had web workers draw 10,000 sheep for two cents a piece. There’s no sense in counting them, but watching strangers draw a sheep is quite mesmerizing.