This project was an exploration in using data collected from APIs to control physical objects. Using the Kimono Labs, I made an API that collected the valuations from the top 5 "Unicorn" companies. Unicorn is a term to name start up companies that have an initial valuation at over $1 billion dollars. As of December 2015, there are currently 144 of these companies, with a large percentage based in the San Francisco Bay area. To represent the rapidly fluctuating valuations of these companies, I chose to represent this data in the form of an inflatable designed to resemble the Salesforce tower. This building is currently being built in the downtown SF area and for some, represents a sign of an impending tech bubble burst. Using a mapped average valuation, the building inflates / deflates accordingly.
I learned a great deal from combining APIs with Firmata and creating the Processing sketch to chromakey out the orange values. It would be interesting to try different variations of this process with different contexts to address connections between finance with physical changes in the environment.