Nauté is a friend of mine that has been working on simulation and visualization of infectious disease outbreaks. This data simulates the spread of a virtual pathogen with COVID-19-like epidemiological parameters in a college campus. It's a raw topic since we're currently living through a pandemic but best to digest it through artwork.

We have long wanted to collaborate on a project and so it was refreshing to jam with real data. Nauté sent me the pandemic visualization and then I did a screen capture of the animation. I had to manually remove any duplicate frames, since my computer couldn't keep up with something in the pipeline. Then I processed it in After Effects to carefully remove the background to create an alpha channel.

My original plan was to do some animated displacement map experiments in Maya and explore some MASH networks. But then I started trying a few different ideas in NestDrop and getting some good results that matched the intensity that I was looking for. A quick but satisfying collab.

Released February 2021