A Single Tear

thingiverse

A Single Tear is a data visualization created for the Generator.x 3.0 workshop, an openLAB Masterclass with Marius Watz, organized at iMAL, Brussels.http://www.imal.org/wikimal/workshop/generatorx-30-code-atoms The data sculpture represents 100000 deaths, 21 age groups, from newborn to centenarian, in 16 categories of causes, from cancer to accidents and violence. The model was entirely coded in Processing using HE_Mesh, no post-processing, beyond scaling, was needed. In Belgium 1% of people alive today will die in the coming year. Each death is a heavily localized social trauma, its repercussions seldomly spreading out and quickly fading into the general background of day-to-day life. In the end nothing remains but a statistic, a point defect in the lives of a few people. A Single Tear ties to reclaim some of the grief. The data of all causes of death in 2006 is collected from the FPS Economy, a cynical reminder of what death means in our society... Instructions A Single Tear was printed on a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic with a Mk 7 extruder. Its design is an intentional challenge to the limits of the fabrication process.