JKU LIT @ Ars Electronica Festival 2020

Ambientartlab
Thomas Lorenz (idea, concept, programming, interface design, artistic direction)
Florian Gruber (programming, interface design, co-art director video production)

Institute of Digital Business – Johannes Kepler University, Linz
Johann Höller (idea, overall concept, data expertise, data visualization modeling, overall project management)
Ursula Niederländer (project management / controlling, legal affairs, video production, project management)
Tanja Illetits-Motta (project management)
Raphael Blasi (project / quality management, video production)
Andreas Rösch (backend developer)
Stefan Küll (art director video production)

Supported by Land Oberösterreich.

Treeversity focuses on the relation between complex data sets and the potential of data visualization to convey complex information at a glance. JKU’s database contains approximately 268,000 enrollment records on 153,000 students, faculties, courses, rooms, exams, schedules and so on.

Treeversity illustrates this life as a tree. Courses, grades, and exams become branches, creating different types of trees. Fully grown or still nascent, withering or growing erratically. Each tells a story of the human behind it. You can imagine someone studying full-time, or balancing work, study, and children all at the same time. Realizing a bad choice or having found their destiny. Together, the trees reveal more. In all of the studies, what are the conditions, the evolutions, the successes, and drop-outs? Treeversity shows the university as a forest, providing a tool to analyze its mechanisms at the same time.