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IT’s easy to forget that at any moment thousands of planes are criss-crossing the globe, tracing out complex traffic patterns wherever they go.

Aaron Koblin, a media artist at the University of California, Los Angeles, gathered the traffic data about planes flying over the US in a typical 24 hours and turned it into a dynamic work of art that says something new about the beauty and emotion of patterns generated by even the most mechanical of objects.

The image above, Flight Patterns, is a screen shot from the resulting animation. Koblin used data provided by the US Federal…