projects | ben fry

Featured projects

Personal Projects (2010–2012)

Peek in Pi, 14 March 2012

Searching for numbers in the digits of π (mobile app, online site, interactive installation)

The Fortune 500, September 2011

The rise and fall of companies and their subjective editorial rankings.

Frankenfont, started 2005, finished in 2011

A reconstruction of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein using parts of incomplete fonts found in PDFs from the internet.

Personal & Commissioned (2004–2009)

The Preservation of Favoured Traces, 4 September 2009

An interactive installation for watching the evolution of Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Specious, 2008–2009

The initial sketch that led to the traces project; an interactive comparison of six books and a million words.

All Streets, 24 April 2008

A map of cities and mountains, compiled from 26 million segments of road.

Emrun, December 2007

Sketches for an illustration based on the publicly available Enron email data set.

Aligning Humans + Mammals, December 2007

Sequences of human DNA aligned with about a dozen other mammals, created as an illustration for Seed Magazine.

First Civil War War, December 2006

Masthead image created for William Safire's On Language column in the New York Times Magazine.

Deprocess, 13 October 2006

An update to disarticulate, created for the 2006 Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial to be shown alongside Processing.

High Priority, 2 April 2006

Illustration for New York Magazine's “High Priority” feature in April, 2006.

Nature HapMap Cover, October 2005

Cover for the journal Nature, announcing the completion of the first phase of the HapMap project.

Humans vs. Chimps, October 2005

An illustration of how the gene FOXP2, believed to be connected to language, differs in humans versus chimps.

Distellamap, August 2005

A look at how code and graphics comingle in Atari 2600 game cartridges.

Salary vs. Performance, July 2005

What baseball teams are spending their money well, and how does it change over the course of the season?

Disarticulate, December 2004

Uses a similar method to dismap to interpret Casey Reas' articulate piece. Created as a large format print commission.

Ph.D. Projects (2000–2004)

Dismap, November 2003

Poster of the entire code from a Nintendo cartridge, linked together to show how it operates

Mario Soup, July 2003

Nintendo game cartridges reveal a beautiful soup of the thousands of elements that make up the game screen.

Revisionist, July 2003

The evolution of code history over dozens of revisions, seen simultaneously.

Civilian Casualties in Iraq, 20 March 2003

Depiction of the civilian casualty count in the Iraq War

Deconstructulator, March 2003

A deconstructed Nintendo emulator that shows how sprites and sprite memory are handled while a game is being played

Axonometric Introns & Exons, January 2003

Large format (9 x 18 feet) print of all the known and predicted genes in the human genome

Chromosome 21, January 2003

Installation depicting thirteen million letters (one quarter) of human chromosome 21, colored by their use

Those Who Trade Freedom, 27 March 2002

People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both

Genome Valence, March 2002

A later adaptation of the Valence project that visualizes biological data, and was created for the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

Strippy, March 2002

A three dimensional genome browser seen in Ang Lee's Hulk.

Shop Activity, October 2001

Large-scale (72 x 24 inches) print using machine shop security camera data to reveal usage patterns

Bagel, June 2001

Explanation of the rendering engine that eventually became the graphics portion of the Processing API.

Chromosome 14, May 2001

Poster depicting all the genes of chromosome 14 in the human genome

Atmosphere, 23 April 2001

Video documentation of the atmosphere project

Chromosome 22, April 2001

The A, C, G, and T letters of human chromosome 22 shown in a three pixel font

The Genetic Code, 2001

A redesign of traditional diagrams of the genetic code to clarify and highlight patterns in the data. Includes an interactive version that depicts how the code works.

Handheld Genome Browser, 2001

The biologist's calculator: a genome browser that runs on a handheld device.

Isometric Haplotype Blocks, 2001

Combination of several different representations of haplotype data into a single interactive tool.

Microarray Clustering with CAST, December 2000

Implementation of the CAST algorithm to cluster microarray data, developed for a class project

N-Dimensional Goodness, December 2000

Sketch working out typography in n-dimensional space, created while developing the Atmosphere project for a MoMA exhibition

Print Studies, October 2000

A series of visual studies; large format print pieces looking at repetition, form, and structure of data.

Masters Projects (1998–2000)

Tendril, November 2000

A web browser that constructs typographic sculptures from the text content of web pages

Colloquium Posters, December 1999

Series of posters designed for the 1999-2000 Colloquium Series at the MIT Media Lab

Immiscible Fluid Mixing, May 1999

Simulation of mixing two immiscible fluids, such as oil and water.

Valence, March 1999

Valence is a set of software sketches about building representations that explore the structures and relationships inside very large sets of information.