3/13/2015 Public Data Visualization: Dramatizing Architecture and Making Data Visible | ISEA2011 Istanbul

LIST OF PAPERS PUBLIC DATA VISUALIZATION: ATTENDEES' TICKET

ART GALLERY
DRAMATIZING ARCHITECTURE AND PRESENTERS' INFORMATION
MAKING DATA VISIBLE
EVENT GALLERY PRESENTERS

ISEA2011 PROGRAM ARTISTS AND CURATORS

In this paper, we explore emerging modes of digitally-mediated participation in urban
FIND space that engage bodily and architectural relationships with data rich environments. PUBLICATIONS
We contend that the combination of data visualization, public space, and digital display
KEYNOTES ORGANIZATION
technologies represent an important aesthetic and technical challenge that engage new
EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS dimensions of presence in a social and material environment characterized by networks PRESS
and data.
PANELS PARTNERSHIPS

PAPER SESSIONS CONTACT

AU THOR(S)
WORKSHOPS Dave Colangelo ABOUT ISEA

Patricio Davila
PRE-SYMPOSIUM EVENTS LOGIN

LOCATIONS search

In tro duc tion

In this paper, we explore emerging modes of digitally-mediated participation in urban

space that engage bodily and architectural relationships with data rich environments.
While briefly outlining each component – data and information visualization and collec-

http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/public-data-visualization-dramatizing-architecture-and-making-data-visible 1/5
3/13/2015 Public Data Visualization: Dramatizing Architecture and Making Data Visible | ISEA2011 Istanbul
tive engagement in public space – we will reflect on some of our recent work that aims to
combine these components in order to test and develop techniques and theories of pub-
lic data visualization. In particular we will focus on E­TOWER (2010), a visualization of
Toronto’s “energy” on the city’s tallest structure, the CN Tower. [1] We will also reflect
on a forthcoming large-scale interactive projection at the Archives of Ontario in Toronto
that will enable participants to navigate through a digital image archive projected on the
side of this building via voice recognition. Some examples from artists that have em-
ployed similar techniques such as Alfredo Jaar and Krzysztof Wodiczko will also be dis-
cussed as they relate to public data visualization. We contend that the combination of
data visualization, public space, and digital display technologies represent an important
aesthetic and technical challenge that engage new dimensions of presence for people,
places, and things in a social and material environment characterized by networks and
data.

A Fluid, Hy brid Space

The rhythms of the contemporary built environment at times feel slow in comparison to
the frenetic oscillations of social practices mediated by information and digital infra-
structures. The immaterial architectures, crowds, pathways and rest-stops of Facebook,
YouTube, Second Life, and Tumblr, to name but a few, are frenetically populated and
dramatized. But, of course, these sites are not limited to an engagement through desktop
computers. Smart phones, networked screens, large digital public displays, and the
many surfaces susceptible to a data projector’s beam allow for a link between concurrent
and contingent on and offline spaces.

Large media facades, reactive and relational architecture, geo-tagging, and networked
location-aware mobile devices present us with a potentially productive confluence; a
fluid, digital layer [2] that permeates the city. This mix of technology and urban space
creates an increasingly conflated real and virtual space, a new hybrid space. [3] The con-
fluence of the networked, fragmented publics of the Internet and the publics formed in
the squares, roads, and shared spaces of our cities, now adorned by media facades, sen-
sors, and mobile devices, presents us with an expanded presence for cultural engage-
ment and self-reflection. As Scott McQuire points out:

… media-dense spaces, comprising a variety of platforms such as large

screens, LED signage, wireless networks, and a growing range of inter-
active capabilities ... are the inheritors of the tradition of public space
constituted by street life, city squares, cafes, and public cultural institu-
tions. They have assumed the task of catering for those who are present
at a moment when being present has assumed new dimensions. [4]

The hybrid layer constituted by the built form, data, and communications networks rep-
resents a productive assemblage upon which identity, knowledge, narrative, and experi-
ence can be explored and constructed.

E­TOWER

It is upon these theoretical foundations that we began, in early 2010, to design what was
to become E­TOWER. Our goal with the project was to create an interface that would
link the participants of Nuit Blanche 2010 with one another through the city’s tallest
structure, the CN Tower. We aimed to engage participants at this all-night art party in a
cooperative, collaborative project that would allow them to visualize their cooperation –
what we termed “energy” – via phone and data networks and reactive architecture. The
CN Tower, already equipped with LEDs and a Light System Manager (LSM) – and not to
mention 500m in height – was an ideal canvas. On the night of Nuit Blanche, from sun-
set to sunrise, over 5,000 participants across the city texted the word “energy” along
with the additional text that was displayed on an E­TOWER Twitter feed. The lights on
the tower were programmed to respond to the quantity and frequency of participation
by changing from “cold” to “hot” colours, growing faster and brighter as “energy stages”
were achieved, culminating in a pre-programmed light show at the end of each full
colour cycle.

In for ma tion Vi su al iza tion

Between data and its expression, between the text messages sent for E­TOWER and the
lights on the CN Tower, lies the crucial function of data visualization.

http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/public-data-visualization-dramatizing-architecture-and-making-data-visible 2/5
3/13/2015 Public Data Visualization: Dramatizing Architecture and Making Data Visible | ISEA2011 Istanbul
Data visualization, or information visualization, is one response to the interpretive and
representational challenges related to information excess. Recent advances in computa-
tion and increasingly ubiquitous networked data-gathering and storing processes and
devices have produced an incredible surge of information available to users (both spe-
cialized researchers and general consumers). This phenomenon has the dual effect of
producing a potential increase of control over the flow of information of users, objects,
and environments as well as a potential decrease in real knowledge due to a glut of infor-
mation.

By compressing vast amounts of data into shapes moving in time and space in order to
extract meaningful information, visualization promises to give users greater access to
phenomena that normally escape human detection due to invisibility, distance or scale.
With E­TOWER, we attempted to measure, interpret and display something otherwise
invisible – the “energy” of the city during its annual all-night art party. Of course, where
we decided to display it – the mapping function that occurs through a visualization oper-
ation – was of particular importance. Donna Cox suggests that visualizations are partic-
ularly powerful in how they recontextualize data. [5] For instance, when demographic
data is placed on a visual representation of the city, source domain is mapped onto a tar-
get domain. Meaning is thus borrowed from one in order to create new meaning. Exam-
ples of this include thermographic imaging as part of energy efficiency analyses, heads-
up displays (HUDs) that place navigational controls and contextual information on
windshields (and by extension onto the environment in front of the vehicle) or on views
of first-person-shooter (FPS) games. Visualizations, in this sense, bring together hetero-
geneous objects onto a common plane or field of view contextually relevant to the data.

Contextually relevant visualization was central to E­TOWER. The CN Tower is a symbol

of the city of Toronto, a marker of civic pride, and thus the “energy” that we were looking
for was both called forth and displayed by the tower, augmenting the significance and
presence of the tower and the citizens of Toronto. E­TOWER mapped quantitative data
onto architectural space, and by nature of its visibility, mapped this on to geographical
space. Both the mapping of information onto geographically relevant space and the
shared experience of interacting with a visualization in that space represent an impor-
tant combination of participatory and meaning-making potentials that form the focus of
our research into public data visualization. E­TOWER explored a way of experiencing
the city that combined light, data, and architecture, and attempted to visualize the emo-
tions, connections, and data that flow between users, objects and their hybrid environ-
ments.

Dra ma tiz ing Ar chi tec ture / Mak ing Data Vis i ble

Alfredo Jaar’s Lights in the City (1999), presented as part of Mois De La Photo in Mon-

treal, was an early and quite successful attempt at mixing data, light, architecture, and
public space. Red lights were installed in the Cupola of the Marché Bonsecours, a land-
mark in old Montreal. Homeless shelters located within 500 yards of the Cupola were
equipped with information about the installations. In each shelter, electronic buttons
connected wirelessly to the red lights in the Cupola were installed. Every time a home-
less person entered any one of the shelters they could push a button to engage the lights.
The lights sent a sign to the city about the unacceptable condition of the homeless. At
the same time, as the Cupola had suffered from fires in the past, the red light also repre-
sented the new and potentially more damaging threat to the city, that of its inability to
care for all of its members. The data collected at the shelters and its representation on
the cupola allowed for the experience of a presence with a human flow of people that
have been historically marginalized and kept invisible. In terms of data visualization,
here we have source domain and target domain combined: a demographic of the city was
collected and displayed to the city by a symbol of the city.

Krzysztof Wodiczko’s works also conjure presence through the use of media and archi-
tecture. His tactics often respond explicitly to the architecture and involve mapping the
human body onto a building. Wodiczko’s projections create a surrealistic collision be-
tween the image of a building or monument and the projected image. In this relation-
ship, the built environment has figured as a central element of the final work as it brings
forth its own social histories. For instance, Wodiczko’s The St. Louis Pro jec tion (2004)
in which prisoners and victims of crime share their stories, was originally intended to be
projected on a large-scale on the face of the St. Louis Historical Old Courthouse – the
site of a landmark lawsuit against slavery in 1846. Due to last-minute controversy con-
cerning the content of the project it was moved to a nearby library building in order to
avoid embarrassment. This signals the potential for the social histories of buildings to be

http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/public-data-visualization-dramatizing-architecture-and-making-data-visible 3/5
3/13/2015 Public Data Visualization: Dramatizing Architecture and Making Data Visible | ISEA2011 Istanbul
re-presenced along with contemporary issues through visualizations and projections.

These examples serve to illustrate how presence can be explored through interactive
symbolic representations and narrative forms. While Jaar’s installation visually ab-
stracted the movement of people in the city, Wodiczko’s work literally places the bodies
of people onto buildings. Both artists highlight, in very public ways, the stories and
traces of people in the city and connect them back to place and the viewers located there.

Just as Jaar and Wodiczko seek to tell us about hidden aspects of historical events and
present circumstances in public, Bruno Latour argues for an active and creative engage-
ment with the flows and networks of people and things that are often concealed within
objects including buildings and other environments. The goal for Latour is to make
things public, to make spaces for critical reflection and engagement. [6]

We see public data visualization working toward the inclusion and interpretation of
many flows and actors on the surface of a pubic structure. Associations between objects
and humans as ongoing processes are represented such that the building upon which the
visualization is projected assumes a kind of liveliness and complexity that juxtaposes the
stable and concrete image of the structure with shifting and ephemeral flows of digital
traces.

Archives of On tario: Dra ma tiz ing the Archive

Following from these examples and our experience with E­TOWER, our next project,
Archives of On tario: Dra ma tiz ing the Archive, aims to create an interface with the
searchable image database of the Archives of Ontario by projecting these images directly
on to the building and allowing participants to access them through voice recognition.
Pedestrians just outside of the building will be able to interact with the archive by speak-
ing their search terms as they face the building. The unbroken interface afforded by
voice recognition, the direct line of sight between the participant and structure, aims to
address the discontinuities we found in the split interface of E­TOWER that required
participants to interact first with their phones and then with the tower. Search terms will
be captured and processed by voice recognition software that will allow participants to
interact by speaking directly to the building. The results will be animated and projected
on the side of the building. Search terms will be conjured by voice and emerge, when
spoken, from behind a curtain, evoking the early practice of veiling sensitive pho-
tographs. Archive images will be pulled through the curtain by white-gloved hands. This
refers to the procedural care that the staff at the archive take with each artifact that
comes to the building. We hope that Archives of On tario: Dra ma tiz ing the Archive will
bring together archive, architecture, space, and audience in an expanded narrative and
dialogue while animating, dramatizing, and connecting each in the process.

Pub lic Data Vi su al iza tion

It is our contention that art and design practice must take on the challenges of relating
data, people, and space when being present includes living amidst ever-expanding digi-
tal archives and real-time data capturing capabilities. Our goal in considering data visu-
alization and public space in the projects we have just described is to relate and make ac-
cessible a mixture of physical and virtual space, to create richer hybrid spaces that relate
data, people, and things to one another in order to provide an opportunity for self-defin-
ition and self-understanding. E­TOWER attempted to do this by soliciting, visualizing,
and mapping real-time data about the city’s collective energy on a symbol of its collec-
tive energy. Archives of On tario: Dra ma tiz ing the Archive will attempt to do this by
moving the existing query and organization capabilities of the digital image archive to
the surface of the building and creating an interface that will link people, place, and
data, dramatizing and extending each in the process. It is important for us that the asso-
ciations between these entities are animated and related such that the building upon
which the visualization is projected assumes a kind of liveliness and complexity that jux-
taposes the stable and concrete image of the building with the data flows that increas-
ingly define our always changing sense of personal and collective identity and architec-
tural and spatial solidity.

Con clu sion

Engaging people and public space through light, architecture, and data – mixing mater-
ial and immaterial spatial regimes in order to explore the expanded presence afforded by

http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/public-data-visualization-dramatizing-architecture-and-making-data-visible 4/5
3/13/2015 Public Data Visualization: Dramatizing Architecture and Making Data Visible | ISEA2011 Istanbul
the current interconnected state of media, communication, and public space – lies at the
heart of our work in public data visualization. Although, as Liliana Bounegru reminds
us, “technological mediated interaction in artistic environments … may be seen as pro-
ducing an aestheticization of human relations and thus mask and weaken the meaning-
fulness of their direct experience by their spectacular representation by overwhelming
the senses,” [7] it can also afford, “opportunities for amplified consciousness of the self
in relation to other beings in an intense sensorial, engaging way which goes beyond com-
munity and allows a more primary, more deep sense of human communion, a collective
genesis afforded through technological mediation.” [8]

Ref er ences and Notes: 

1. Dave Colangelo and Patricio Davila, “E-TOWER,” E-TOWER Website, http://

www.etower.ca (accessed August 14, 2011).
2. Mirjam Struppek, “Urban Screens – The Urbane Potential of Public Screens for
Interaction,” in In ter ac tive City 6, no. 2 (2006): 1-5.
3. Adriana De Souza e Silva, “From Cyber to Hybrid,” in Space and Cul ture 9, no. 3
(2006): 261-278.
4. Scott McQuire, “Mobility, Cosmopolitanism and Public Space in the Media
City,” in Urban Screens Reader, eds. Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and
Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009), 61.
5. Donna Cox, “Metaphoric Mappings: The Art of Visualization,” in Aes thetic Com ­
put ing, ed. Paul A. Fishwick, 89-114 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
6. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Mak ing Things Pub lic: At mos pheres of Democ ­
racy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005).
7. Liliana Bounegru, “Interactive Media Artworks for Public Space: The Potential
of Art to Influence Consciousness and Behaviour in Relation to Public Spaces,”
in Urban Screens Reader, eds. Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and Sabine
Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009), 213.
8. Ibid., 213.

http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/paper/public-data-visualization-dramatizing-architecture-and-making-data-visible 5/5