Jenny Odell collects and organizes all kinds of things, from meticulously sorting digital finds on Google Maps to tracing the origins of everything she used, wore, ate or bought on one particular day in 2013.

Her work often pulls objects out of context, aggregating and arranging something like a set of pools against a neutral backdrop (as seen above) or taking an entire industrial complex and carefully stripping it of its surroundings (like the facility below).

On June 26th, she will join an assortment of other unusual, curious and brilliant creatives — experts in the realms of art, design, interaction and information — as a speaker at the annual Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis, MN.

Designer, entrepreneur and artist Nicholas Felton, creator of the famously detailed and introspective data visualizations, will be back this year as well to talk about his recent work. His numerous personal annual reports condense the events of a year into a tapestry of maps, graphs and statistics.

Artist and programmer Gene Kogan will bring his interest in “generative systems, artificial intelligence, and software for creativity and self-expression.” He has collaborated on various open-source software projects, working at the “intersection of code, art, and technology activism.”

Others include: a smell researcher and artist with a collection of over 7,000 scents, a designer and software designer pursuing machine learning and news automation, and dozens of other fascinating folks from all over the world.

Eyeo asks: “What data is, where it comes from, and how we utilize it, looks different than ever before. What can we do with it all? What can’t we do? Artists, designers and coders build and bend technology to see what’s possible. What’s next with interaction, what’s revealed by the data. Eyeo brings together the most intriguing and exciting people in these arenas today.” If you haven’t been, this is as good a year as any to go for the first time — it is a wonderful and unique experience. Get tickets here.

During the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, a German newspaper published step-by-step driving directions from Berlin to Baghdad, highlighting the interconnectivity of contiguous European and Middle Eastern land masses.

This series of maps from Moovel Lab highlights similar phenomena, starting with a map that shows the truth of an old aphorism about all roads leading to Rome. Ancient Romans created an estimated 50,000 miles of road across Europe, Asia and Africa, with their coastal Italian capital as the origin point.

Next, they moved on to 10 major cities in the United States, analyzing how regional traffic flowed into each, before going through a full analysis of fastest routes to state capitals. The results were surprisingly varied: “Remarkable are the different road networks throughout the States. While the east coast seems to rely on roads parallel to the coast. The rockies and appalachian mountains reveal their topography with their curvy roads containing some blank spots not reached by any road. While the mid west of the USA show long straight road networks in rectangular alignment.”

Their process is relatively intuitive. The mapmakers overlaid a grid on existing open-source maps, then added a query: how would one get from here to Rome (or other cities)? The results have been turned into maps that look almost like a study of the human vascular system, with small veins feeding larger arteries along the path to the hub point. “The outcome of this project is somewhere between information visualisation and data art, unveiling mobility and a very large scale. View and interactively explore all roads to rome and other cities.”

An experiment in intentional synesthesia, this combination of sculpture, music and technology enables us to actually see the physical form of individual songs. ‘Reify’ is a collaborative project that creates a new way to experience music, transforming it into a tangible object that transforms before our eyes. So-called ‘totems’ are made to visually represent an artist’s song, and encoded with music and interactive visual experiences that can be viewed on a smartphone or tablet.

Musicians, sculptors and app designers got together to build a platform that lets artists express their music in physical form. Each totem is a sculptural object in its own right, entirely unique in shape, 3D-printed from plastic or cast in bronze. Simply gazing upon these visual translations of sound is cool enough, but then comes the app that truly brings them to life.

Load up the Stylus app, point your mobile device at the totem and you’ll be treated to an interactive visual experience that plays along with the song. “Each experience is unique in style and content,” say the designers. “Some are game-like. Some are conceptual explorations. Others are both… and neither. All are direct expressions of the artist’s creative vision.”

While a Kickstarter campaign held in July didn’t raise enough funds to move forward with the project, it’s a really cool look into how various forms of creative expression will continue to evolve along with technology, and the potential for more crossover. Check out another cool project exploring what music looks like in 3D.

Translated into glowing orbs of light with a rainbow of colors representing signal strength, these visualizations of wi-fi signals are like Victorian spirit photography for the modern age. Luis Hernan of Newcastle University makes the invisible not only visible but also vaguely eerie with his project, Digital Ethereal.

Hernan developed a homemade gadget called a Kirlian Device that, appropriately enough, looks like a piece of ghost hunting equipment. The instrument “scans continuously for wireless networks, and transforms the signal strength to colour LEDs.”

The effect is captured in a series of long-exposure photographs akin to light painting, the results a mass of swirling colored light showing the movement of the signals across a space.

In another segment of the Digital Ethereal project, a gallery demonstration of a ‘chandelier’ running on the accompanying Kirlian Device Android App, which “explores the interaction of visitors with Hertzian Space.” Visitors interact with the electromagnetic waves around dangling cell phones, producing different lighting effects on the screens.

We’ve seen what audio frequencies look like in mesmerizing resonance experiments using sand – so how does the same concept translate to a more volatile medium? The science video blog Veritasium carried out an experiment that uses flammable gas to create the pyromaniac music lover’s dream: an audio visualization in the form of fire.

It all comes down to the vibrations produced by sound. Veritasium teamed up with physics and chemistry demonstrators to create a ‘Pyro Board’ based on the Rubens’ Tube, also known as a standing wave flame tube. Invented by a German physicist, the Rubens’ Tube shows the relationship between sound waves and sound pressure.

Sealed at both ends and perforated along the top, the pipe is attached to a speaker or frequency generator at one side and a supply of flammable gas at the other. Variations in sound cause vibrations in the air to affect the flow rate of the gas, causing the flames to change in height.

The team translated this idea to two dimensions with what’s essentially a plane of bunson burners, with 2,500 holes. The louder the music is played, the higher the flames become.