An archived art project from 2017
Note: This is a historical archive. The code is preserved as-is from 2017 and is not maintained. It requires Python 2.7 and dependencies that are no longer supported. Many of the external data sources it scrapes from likely no longer exist.
Air Water Stack was a live data visualization art piece that scraped real-time information from the internet and rendered it as moving layers in OpenGL. Created in 2017, it combined:
- Live satellite position data
- Internet traffic visualizations
- Underwater cable network data
- YouTube live streams (NASA, aquarium feeds)
The piece visualized the invisible infrastructure of global communication - satellites overhead, cables underwater, data flowing between continents - all rendered as a hypnotic, constantly updating visual composition.
- Python 2.7
- Selenium WebDriver for web scraping
- PyOpenGL for 3D rendering
- pygame for graphics
- PyQt4 for web rendering
- OpenCV for video processing
- Multiprocessing for concurrent data streams
This code is archived and not expected to run in modern environments. It was built for:
- Python 2.7 (EOL since 2020)
- Firefox with Selenium
- Specific websites from 2017 that may no longer exist
If you're interested in the concept, consider it a time capsule of web scraping and data visualization techniques from that era.
Originally created: 2017 Co-Authored-By: nullp0tr Archived: 2025