A Single Tear

thingiverse

"A Single Tear," a data visualization, emerged from Generator.x 3.0 workshop held at iMAL, Brussels, and led by Marius Watz. The sculpture symbolizes 100,000 deaths distributed among 21 age groups and 16 causes, including cancer and accidents. Entirely coded in Processing with HE_Mesh, it required no post-processing beyond scaling. In Belgium, 1% of people will die in the coming year, each death leaving a localized social impact that soon fades into obscurity. The artwork reclaims some of this grief, using data from FPS Economy to represent all causes of death in 2006. Notably, "A Single Tear" was printed on a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic with a Mk 7 extruder, pushing the fabrication process's limits.