Daniel Crompton

Collection · Daniel Crompton · 2026

24 Birds

24 Birds featured piece
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24 pieces · press for another

Twenty-four grey-headed albatrosses were tracked by GPS from Campbell Island, five hundred kilometres south of New Zealand, across a single breeding season. 24 Birds is a portrait of each one, built from nothing but its own record: 93,474 fixes, every one a real position a real bird occupied. The rings are the shape of where it went, eroded inward tide by tide. The strokes follow the direction it was travelling. The colour shifts with how far it got from home and how hard it was working when it got there. Nothing here is decided in advance except the palette, and even that gets pulled somewhere else by the data before the piece is finished.

Medium · data art, Python · archival giclée
Source · GPS tracking, Torres et al. 2017
Collection size · 24 pieces, one per bird

Read how it was made ↗

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Watch the track that made the piece

Every piece in this collection began as a line on a map. Pick a bird, press play, and the artwork is drawn beside the actual path the albatross flew, coloured by distance from the colony or by what it was doing at the time. This is the whole argument of the collection in one panel: the art is not an impression of the data, it is the data.

Select a bird by its portrait

GPS tracks from the Movebank Data Repository (Torres et al. 2017), Thalassarche chrysostoma, Campbell Island. 93,474 fixes across 24 individuals.
Behaviour states inferred from a three-state hidden Markov model. Full ecological analysis at dtcrompton.github.io ↗.


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