Tripped Out: The 2003 Northeast Blackout by School of the Art Institute of Chicago

A large-format data visualization depicts the complex narrative of the 2003 Northeast Blackout, which began imperceptibly in Ohio over the course of four hours and cascaded within eight minutes into one of the largest blackouts in history.

Processing was used to create each graph as well as to map GeoJSON coordinate data of the hundreds of transmission lines that feed power from generators to consumers across North America as one giant interconnected network.