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Artistic Visualization Lev Manovich PDF

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91 views19 pages

Artistic Visualization Lev Manovich PDF

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Ana Paula Lourenço
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19 Artistic Visualization Lev Manovich Before the end of the 1990s, the use of data visualization was limited to particular scientific disciplines or financial pages of newspapers. It was not part of the vernacular visual culture, By the end of the 2000s, the situation had changed dramatically. For example, the Muscum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) presented a dynamic visualization ofits collection on five screens in its lobby. MoMA also included a num. ber of artistic visualizations in its large survey exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind (2008). The New York Times was regularly featuring custom visualizations both in its print and web editions created by the in-house New York Timesinteractive team. The Web was full of numerous sophisticated visualization projects created by artists, designers, scientists, and students, If one searches for certain types of public data, the first result returned by a Google search links to automatically created interactive graphs of the respective data, Dozens of free web-based visualization tools have become available. In short, three hundred years after William Playfair started the field. by inventing the now classic visualization techniques (bar chart, pie chart, line chart), data visualization has finally entered the realms of both high and popular cultures, ‘This shift was acknowledged by the leading data visualization designers themselves: Information visualization is becoming more than a set of tools, technologies and techniques for large data sets, It is emerging as a medium in its own right, with a wide range of expressive potential. (Rodenbeck 2008) ‘Visualization is ready to be a mass medium. (Viégas and Wattenberg 2010) Artists played a key role in the popularization of the data visualization field in the 2000s, and created some of the most memorable visualizations of the decade. They also created a new visual programming environment—Processing (2001) by Ben Fry and Casey Reas—and built a large community around it. Through Processing, A Companion 0 Digital Ar, Firs Btion. Edited by Christiane Pal © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc: Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ine ARTISTIC VISUALIZATION mum 427 many more art and design students learned programming and started to explore computer graphics, interactives, and visualization. Artists also set up and taught in hundreds of digital art programs around the world, thus preparing, a new generation of people who could create images, animations, spaces, sounds, and all other media types (including visualizations) via programming, The development of the data visualization field in the 2000s happened in parallel to another technological and social movement—the rise of Big Data, that is, massive data sets, which could not be easily understood by using the existing approaches that modern society had developed to analyze information. Among the key sources of such data was “social media,” user-generated content and user activities on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google+, Weibo, etc. Because al leading social media networks made it easy for anybody with knowledge of programming to down: load their user data and content (using their APIs, which stands for Application Programming Interfaces), they also indirectly contributed to the popularization of data visualization, Getting, cleaning, and organizing a large data set ean typically take a significant amount of time, but downloading, social media data from the networks is relatively simple and fast. As a result, many memorable visualizations of large data sets in the 2000s featured data from Twitter, Flickr, and other then popular social media networks. In this chapter I will not try to address every kind of aesthetic strategy developed. by visualization artists, or to review all important projects ereated in that field. Instead I will focus on what I see as one of the most important and interesting developments in this arca of digital art. I will discuss work by artists who challenged the most fundamental principles of the data visualization field as it has existed sinee the 18th century. Instead of continuing to represent data using points, lines, and other geomettic primitives, they pioneered a different method which I call “media visual zation”: new visual representations derived from visual media objects (images, video, text). T will analyze well-known examples of artistic visualizations that use th approach: Listening Post (Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, 2001), Cinema Redux (Brendan Dawes, 2004), and The Preservation of Favoured Traces (Ben Fry, 2009), ‘Along with examples from the classics of artistic data visualization, I will also use relevant ones from the projects created in my own research lab. Following the pio neering work of other artists discussed in this chapter, we developed software tools to visualize massive cultural data sets and applied them to a variety of data sets, ranging from 4535 covers of Time magazine to 2.3 million Instagram photos from thirteen global cities. In order for us to understand how visualization artists went against the norms of the field, we first need to understand these conventions, which will be discussed in the following section. Defining Data Visualization ‘What is data visualization? Despite the growing popularity of datavis (a common abbreviation for “data visualization”), it is not so easy to come up with a definition that would work for all the types of projects being created today and, at the same time, would clearly separate datavis from other related fields, such as scientific visual zation and information design. So let us start with a provisional definition that we can 428 ame LEV MANOVICH modify later. Let us define data visualization as a mapping between discrete data and a visual representation. We can also use different concepts besides “representation,” each bringing an additional meaning to the subject. For example, if we believe that a brain uses a number of distinct representational and cognitive modalities, we can define data visualization as a mapping from other cognitive modalities (such as mathematical and propositional) to an image modality ‘My definition does not cover all aspects of data visualization—such as the distinc tions between static, dynamic (j.c., animated), and interactive visualization (the latter, of course, being most important today). In fact, most definitions of datavis (or its synonym, information visualization) by computer science researchers equate it with the use of interactive computer-

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