Forma Fluens

Each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. We are living through a widely distributed amateur creativity. We are in the age of sharing, in the age of user-generated content. In Forma Fluens (Latin: Flowing Form) you are not a passive observer or consumer. With our DoodleMaps, you can be the author of one of the stories that emerge from the exploration of millions of drawings. Or you can generate new icons from the overlap of thousands of drawings with IconoLap. Finally, in the video Points in Movement you can observe an overlap of millions of drawings and find out how all humanity draws some forms in the same way.

DoodleMaps

Explore millions of drawings.

Points in Movement

Observe the human cognitive perception reflected in drawings.

Icono Lap

Generate new icons from the overlap of thousands of drawings.

All those varieties of drawings push us to expand our idea of beauty. The collection of the entire QuickDraw dataset in a single large-scale image develops a visual language that uncovers the building blocks of modernist Pop art, Street art - Keith Haring - with repetition of the same subject in multiple variations. Every single drawing is more or less close to the raw-art vision of Jean Dubuffet, where the traditional standards of beauty are not followed in favor of a more authentic approach to image-making. Generated in a few seconds these drawings never became too mannered, and offer a fascinating window into human cognitive activity.

The lines that compose every drawing are in free finger movements, the signs people use are never identical, sometimes close to the reality, sometimes are so close to a personal vision of the reality, that it becomes too obscure to be understandable.

The similarity of form in the drawings could be a similarity in the cultural atmosphere, a similarity of ideals, a similarity in the inner feeling expressed in these external forms: My drawing reveals how I see the object represented, how I imagine, and how I remember it.

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Points in Movement

200 thousand people draw almost in the same way

Panda

Time sequence on how 113,508 people draw a panda.

Eye

Time sequence on how 125,795 people draw a human eye.

Sun

Time sequence on how 133,676 people draw the sun.

Face

Time sequence on how 161,515 people draw a human face.

The language of drawing from 50 million QuickDraw.

These sketches come from QuickDraw, a game where we are invited to represent an object, action, animal in 30 seconds. In order to win, I have to find in a few seconds how to represent a stop signal, rain, apple, mouth. In just a few months the game has become very popular, and now this is the largest collection of sketches ever created, with over 50 million. A gigantic number that represents the power of a collective expression of society. These drawings are a form of direct thinking, they offer a form of embodied abstraction of reality for all the humanity.
Can these drawings collection make us understand something new about humanity? By using these data, can we study the differences in how we see and remember things in relation to our local culture?

We have found drawings from 215 different nations. There are a few places in the world where this game has not arrived, such as Antarctica, Cuba, Cook Islands, Sahara, Sierra Leone ... But 45% of these drawings come from the US, followed by the UK (7%), Canada (4%), Germany (3%), Australia, Russia, Brazil, Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic and Italy are at 2%, followed by many other countries at 1% such as Korea, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Japan, Emirates, Taiwan, and many more.
To make our analysis more meaningful we decided to observe only nations with at least 200,000 drawings and a minimum of 1000 drawings for each category. This means limiting our observations to a group of 34 nations.
This is a game with a predominantly anglophone audience. As a small test, if players from around the world are not US citizens on vacation we had a look at the power outlet sketches.

Germany

Power outlet from Germany.

Japan

Power outlet from Japan.

Malaysia

Power outlet from Malaysia.

Sweden

Power outlet from Sweden.

By applying the overlap, we can define the typical form of a power outlet in each nation. The results seem to confirm that most players draw the corresponding power outlet of the nation they connected from. Because the game requires an object to be drawn in 20 seconds, we can assume that the design is instinctive and representative of the power outlet idea of its own nation.
After this experiment we can therefore assume that we can use these data as representative of 34 different countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United States, United Kingdom, Viet Nam.

Convergence | Divergence

Step 1. We identify categories with strong convergence and strong divergence.
Examples of strong convergence: wine bottle, asparagus, bowtie, envelope, circle, and many more.

Convergence

Wine Bottle

Convergence

Asparagus

Convergence

Bowtie

Convergence

Envelope

For some categories we also observe a strong convergence in the sequence of drawing sketches. We tend to draw outer shapes first to define a frame and then add details. See how many people start drawing the head shape (circle) for a smiley first, and then adding eyes and mouth. Similar is true for cars, etc. With our video Points in Movement you can observe this behavior more in detail.

Many categories are ambiguous. Their iconography is diverging. Examples are: Arm, Backpack, Banana, Bed, Dragon, Frog, Lightning, Mosquito and many more. With our IconoLap tool you might still be able to find clusters of convergence.