Benjamin Fry

Until now I was trying not to incorporate Ben Fry in my list of references or key thinkers, for the only reason that everyone does. Going through the MFADT Thesis Archive it is hard to find a project that doesn’t mention the work of Ben Fry. Anyway, I guess that, as much as I tried not to, I will have to refer his work, particularly in two projects that correlate with my thesis subject.

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

Here are some images of different versions of Valence:


Copyright Benjamin Fry – MIT.

This image shows the Genome Valence, a version of Valence created for the 2002 Whitney Biennal, and it’s a visual representation of the algorithm (called BLAST) most commonly used for genome searches.


Copyright Benjamin Fry – MIT.

In this version of Valence, the application reads 200,000-word text of Mark Twain’s “The Innocents Abroad”.


Copyright Benjamin Fry – MIT.

Here, Valence builds a representation of the word usage in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Nachlass”. As part of an installation for the Ars Electronica 2001, visitors could “watch as the structure changes as valence reads the text, or examine the structure through zooming and rotation”.

For more information about the Valence project click here.


Anemone is a project that uses the “process of organic information design to visualize the changing structure of a web site, juxtaposed with usage information”.

As Ben Fry describes, the “user interaction with this visualization is important. The viewer can click a node to discover which web page it represents. They can also move nodes around as a way to peek inside the data set and take a closer look at what’s happening. Nodes can be dragged about the screen, pinned down, and watched in relation to other parts of the structure”.

Some screen shots of Anemone:




Copyright Benjamin Fry – MIT.