This animated film chronicles the tables.data project, which transforms archival documents on the Sahel and Hausaland into searchable, high-fidelity data, mapping the region's history from 1615 to the present. The film explores how informal economies and trade routes persist over time, linking colonial records with contemporary banditry surveys in the Bahaushe library’s research. Ultimately, the project structures 700,000 tokens across two volumes, revealing enduring historical patterns of conflict, trade, and political legitimacy.
What happens when you pit one adult male against the average ten-year-old from every country on Earth?
This film works through that question using real survey data — WHO Child Growth Standards and the UNICEF–WHO–World Bank Joint Malnutrition Estimates (2024) — to build adjusted body weight profiles for children across 162 countries. The adult subject is modelled on documented biomechanical parameters based on his physical attributes: 84 kg bodyweight, 33 age, 109.1 kg lean body mass (Boer 1984), 1,232 N peak strike force, and a 205.3 cm wingspan.
#stunting#global health#child development#body mass ratio#WHO#malnutrition#biomechanics#thought experiment#anthropometry#UNICEF#simulation#data visualization#public health#global development
A cinematic reconstruction of what GPS/GSM tracking would actually require to work in Nigeria’s ungoverned forest kidnapping hotspots. Through one recurring landscape, the film follows the life of a tracking signal as battery limits, missing cell coverage, movement time, and human response windows narrow the chance of rescue into seconds. It is a story about technology, infrastructure, and the line where both begin to fail.
In this reconstructed Sahel village, we live through 45 years of the past and 15 years into the future, following the rain winds misbehaving due to the impact of climate change. Food stress serves as an indicator of the current and impending crisis. Sorghum's stress threshold quietly slipped across in the mid-1980s. Maize crossed its own in 2001. As we approach 2°C warming levels, the rains are larger than they were in 1981, yet the harvest goes thin anyway because heat brought the rain, and heat will take it back. By 2041, the village's last fallback crop, millet, will hit its own breaking point.
This four-minute visualisation follows a single gust of wind from its birth over the Gulf of Guinea to become the same wind that delivers the monsoon. Watch what becomes of it across forty-five years of warming.
We reconstruct how this affects life, especially agriculture. In northern Nigeria, sorghum crossed its heat threshold in the mid-1980s. Maize crossed its own in 2001. Millet, the toughest of the three staple grains, is about one-tenth of a degree above its own threshold. At the current rate of warming, it will break in 2041.
Built on ERA5, CHIRPS v2.0, FAO Paper 56, and the 2024 Ben-Yami AMOC-collapse experiment.
Q2 — Bad Seasons in a Warmer World. An animated data visualization examining how rising global temperatures are reshaping seasonal patterns — compressing cold seasons, extending heat extremes, and breaking the rhythms that agriculture, ecosystems, and human infrastructure were built around.
