Maps, cities and data visualization are among our sharpest points of interest, so when the the three converge, we’re swooning all over. SubMap, which we stumbled upon on the excellent new ArtsTech News aggregator, is a visualization project that flies in the face of the traditional conception of maps as static and objective representations of the public world, and instead maps the subjective personal experiences of a city’s residents.

From locals’ favorite places in Budapest to Finland’s real-time Twitter chatter to a subjective map of the city plotting the cartographers’ homes as the epicenter, the maps are living abstractions of civic sentiment, part Hitotoki, part ComplexCity, part We Feel Fine, part something else entirely.

The project’s latest iteration, SubCity 2.0: Ebullition, captures 12 years worth of data patterns from origo.hu, Hungary’s leading news site, not only visually but also through a sonic representation.

In the 30 fps animation, each frame represents a single day, each second covers a month, starting from December 1998 until October 2010. Whenever a Hungarian city or village is mentioned in any domestic news on origo.hu website, it is translated into a force that dynamically distorts the map of Hungary. The sound follows the visual outcome, creating a generative ever changing drone.”

SubMap is the work of Dániel Feles, Krisztián Gergely, Attila Bujdosó and Gáspár Hajdu from Hungarian new media lab Kitchen Budapest, a hub for young researchers and experimenteurs looking to explore the intersection of mobile communication, online communities and urban space.

via Creators Project