Quotes from 'Data Visualisation as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime'
Since Descartes introduced the system for quantifying space in the seventeenth century, graphical representation of functions has been the cornerstone of modern mathematics... In the last few decades, the use of computers for visualization enabled development of a number of new scientific paradigms such as chaos and complexity theories, and artificial life. It also forms the basis of a new field of scientific visualization. Modern medicine relies on visualization of body and its functioning; modern biology similarly is dependent on visualization of DNA and proteins. But while contemporary pure and applied sciences, from mathematics and physics to biology and medicine heavily relies on data visualization, in the cultural sphere visualization until recently has been used on a much more limited scale, being confined to 2D graphs and charts in the financial section of a newspaper, or on occasional 3D visualization on television to illustrate the trajectory of a space station or of a missile.
This is the new politics of mapping of computer culture. Who has the power to decide what kind of mapping to use, what dimensions are selected; what kind of interface is provided for the user – these new questions about data mapping are now as important as more traditional questions about the politics of media representation by now well rehearsed in cultural criticism (who is represented and how, who is omitted).
Mapping one data set into another, or one media into another, is one of the most common operations in computer culture, and it is also common in new media art.3 Probably the earliest mapping project which received lots of attention and which lies at the intersection of science and art (because it seems to function well in both contexts) was Natalie Jeremijenko’s “live wire.” Working in Xerox PARC in the early 1990s, Jeremijenko created a functional wire sculpture which reacts in real time to network behavior: more traffic causes the wire to vibrate more strongly.
'Database as a symbolic form'
In 1998, Lev Manovich came out with an essay called "Database as a Symbolic Form". In this essay, Manovich defines the term database and compares it to narratives. He explains how a database is like a big unordered list, whereas narratives orders their list with a beginning, an end, and a certain path to follow. Readers tend to want to mold things into a narrative. He uses the example of Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov, and describes it as "the most important example of database imagination in modern media art".[13] Manovich applauds Vertov for creating something that illustrates a middle-ground between databases and narratives. As well, he discusses the concepts of paradigm and syntagm and how new media reverses their original relationship. Instead of syntagm being explicit and paradigm implicit, the paradigm (database) is given material existence and the syntagm (narrative) is de-materialized.
"The editors of Mediamatic journal, who devoted a whole issue to the
topic of "the storage mania" (Summer 1994) wrote: "A growing number of organizations are embarking on ambitious projects. Everything is being collected: culture, asteroids, DNA patterns, credit records, telephone conversations; it doesn't matter."Once it is digitized, the data has to be cleaned up, organized, indexed. The computer age brought with it a new cultural algorithm: reality>media>data>database."
"As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events).
Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world."
Quotes from 'Database as Symbolic Form'
"Digital computer turns out to be the perfect medium for the database form. Like a virus,
databases infect CD-ROMs and hard drives, servers and Web sites. Can we say that database is the cultural form most characteristic of a computer? In her 1978 article "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism," probably the single most well-known article on video art, art historian Rosalind Krauss argued that video is not a physical medium but a psychological one. In her analysis, "video's real medium is a psychological situation, the very terms of which are to withdraw attention from an external object — an Other — and invest it in the Self."
In short, video art is a support for the psychological condition of narcissism. Does new media similarly function to play out a particular psychological condition, something which can be called a database complex? In this respect, it is interesting that database imagination has accompanied computer art from its very beginning. In the 1960s, artists working with computers wrote programs to systematically explore the combinations of different visual elements. In part they were following art world trends such as minimalism. Minimalist artists executed works of art according to pre-existent plans; they also created series of images or objects by systematically varying a single parameter. So, when minimalist artist Sol LeWitt spoke of an artist's idea as "the machine which makes the work," it was only logical to substitute the human executing the idea by a computer.
At the same time, since the only way to make pictures with a computer was by writing a computer program, the logic of computer programming itself pushed computer artists in the same
directions. Thus, for artist Frieder Nake a computer was a "Universal Picture Generator," capable of producing every possible picture out of a combination of available picture elements and colors.
In 1967 he published a portfolio of 12 drawings which were obtained by successfully multiplying a square matrix by itself. Another early computer artist Manfred Mohr produced numerous images which recorded various transformations of a basic cube. Even more remarkable were films by John Witney, the pioneer of computer filmmaking. His films such as "Permutations" (1967), "Arabesque" (1975) and others systematically explored the transformations of geometric forms obtained by manipulating elementary mathematical functions. Thus they substituted successive accumulation of visual effects for narrative, figuration or even formal development. Instead they presented the viewer with databases of effects."
Quotes from Lev Manovich - Meaningful Beauty: Data Mapping as Anti-sublime
"Having looked at the particular examples of data visualization art, we are now in the position to make a few observations and pose a few questions. I often find myself moved by these projects emotionally. Why? Is it because they carry the promise of rendering the phenomena that are beyond the scale of human senses into something that is within our reach, something visible and tangible? This promise makes data mapping into the exact opposite of the Romantic art concerned with the sublime. In contrast, data visualization art is concerned with the anti-sublime. If Romantic artists thought of certain phenomena and effects as un-representable, as something which goes beyond the limits of human senses and reason, data visualization artists aim at precisely the opposite: to map such phenomena into a representation whose scale is comparable to the scales of human perception and cognition. For instance, Jebratt’s 1:1 reduces the cyberspace – usually imagined as vast and maybe even infinite – to a single image that fits within the browser frame. Similarly, the graphical clients for Carnivore transform another invisible and “messy” phenomena – the flow of data packets through the network that belong to different messages and files – into ordered and harmonious geometric images. The macro and the micro, the infinite and the endless are mapped into manageable visual objects that fit within a single browser frame.
The desire to take what is normally falls outside of the scale of human senses and to make visible and manageable aligns data visualization art with modern science. Its subject matter, i.e. data, puts it within the paradigm of modern art. In the beginning of the twentieth century art largely abandoned one of its key – if not the key – function – portraying the human being. Instead, most artists turned to other subjects, such as abstraction, industrial objects and materials (Duchamp, minimalists), media images (pop art), the figure of artist herself or himself (performance and video art) – and now data. Of course it can be argued that data art represents the human being indirectly by visualizing her or his activities (typically the movements through the Net). Here again I would like to single out the works of Simon who makes explicit references to the tradition of modernist abstraction (one of his works, for instance, refers to Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 1942-43) – and also includes figurative elements in his
compositions, such as outlines of Manhattan Midtown buildings and street traffic. In fact, Simon refers to this piece as a view from his studio window – a type of image that has a well-known history in modern art (for instance, views of Paris by the impressionists).
Another important question worth posing is about arbitrary versus motivated choices in mapping. Since computers allow us to easily map any data set into another set, I often wonder why did the artist choose this or that mapping when endless other choices were also possible. Even the very best works which use mapping suffer from this fundamental problem. This is the “dark side” of mapping and of computer media in general – its built-in existential angst. By allowing us to map anything into anything else, to construct infinite number of different interfaces to a media object, to follow infinite trajectories through the object, and so on, computer media simultaneously makes all these choices appear arbitrary – unless the artist uses special strategies to motivate her or his choices.
Lets look at one example of this problem. One of the most outstanding architectural buildings of the last decade is Jewish Museum Berlin by Daniel Liberskind. The architect put together a map that showed the addresses of Jews who were living in the neighborhood of the museum site before World War II. He then connected different points on the map together and projected the resulting net onto the surfaces of the building. The intersections of The net projection and the design became multiple irregular windows. Cutting through the walls and the ceilings at different angles, the windows point to many visual references: narrow eyepiece of a tank; windows of a
Medieval cathedral; exploded forms of the cubist/abstract/supermatist paintings of the 1910s-1920s. Just as in the case of Janet Cardiff's audio walks, here the virtual becomes a powerful force that re-shapes the physical. In Jewish Museum, the past literally cuts into the present. Rather than something ephemeral, here data space is materialized, becoming a sort of monumental sculpture.
But there was one problem which I kept thinking about when I visited still empty museum building in 1999 – the problem of motivation. On the one hand, Liberskind's procedure to find the addresses, make a map and connect all the lines appears very rational, almost the work of scientist. On the other hand, as far as I know, he does not tell us anything about why he projected the net in this way as opposed to any other way. So I find something contradictory in fact that all painstakingly collected and organized data at the end is arbitrary "thrown" over the shapes of the building. I think this example illustrates well the basic problem of the whole mapping paradigm. Since usually there are endless ways to map one data set onto another, the particular mapping chosen by the artist often is not motivated, and as a result the work feels arbitrary. We are always told that in good art "form and content form a single whole" and that "content motivates form." Maybe in a "good" work of data art the mapping used have to somehow relate to the content and context of data - although I am not sure how this would work in general.
One way to deal with this problem of motivation is to not to hide but to foreground the arbitrary nature of the chosen mapping. Rather than try to always being rational, data art can instead make the method out of irrationality. This of course was the key strategy of the twentieth century Surrealists. In the 1960s the late Surrealists – the Situationists – developed a number of methods for their “the dérive” (the drift). The goal of “the dérive” was a kind of spatial “ostranenie” (estrangement): to let the city dweller experience the city in a new way and thus politicize her or his perception of the habitat. One of these methods was to navigate through Paris using a Map of London. This is the kind of poetry and conceptual elegance I find missing from mapping projects in new media art. Most often these projects are driven by the rational impulse to make sense out of our complex world, the world there many process and forces are invisible and are out Read “against the grain,” any descriptive or mapping system which consists from quantitative data – a telephone directory, the trace route of a mail message, etc. - acquires both grotesque and poetic qualities. Conceptual artists explored this well, and data visualization artists may learn from these explorations.
of our reach. The typical strategy then is to take some data set – Internet traffic, market indicators, amazon.com book recommendation, or weather – and map it in some way. This strategy echoes not the aesthetics of the Surrealists but a rather different paradigm of the 1920s left avant-garde. The similar impulse to "read off" underlying social relations from the visible reality animated many left artists in the 1920s, including the main hero of my 'The Language of New Media – Dziga Vertov. Vertov' 1929 film A Man With a Movie Camera is brave attempt at visual epistemology – to reinterpret the often banal and seemingly insignificant images of everyday life as the result of the struggle between old and the new.
Important as the data mapping new media projects are, they miss something else. While modern art tried to play the role of "data-epistemology," thus entering in completion with science and mass media to explain to us the patterns behind all the data surrounding us, it also always played a more unique role: to show us other realities embedded in our own, to show us the ambiguity always present in our perception and experience, to show us what we normally don't notice or don't pay attention to. Traditional "representational” forms - literature, painting, photography, and cinema – played this role very well. For me, the real challenge of data art is not about how to map some abstract and impersonal data into something meaningful and beautiful – economists, graphic designers, and scientists are already doing this quite well. The more interesting and at the end maybe more important challenge is how to represent the personal subjective experience of a person living in a data society. If daily interaction with volumes of data and numerous messages is part of our new “data-subjectivity,” how can we represent this experience in new ways? How new media can represent the ambiguity, the otherness, the multi-dimensionality of our experience, going beyond already familiar and “normalized” modernist techniques of montage, surrealism, absurd, etc.? In short, rather than trying hard to pursue the anti-sublime ideal, data visualization artists should also not forget that art has the unique license to portray human subjectivity – including its fundamental new dimension of being “immersed in data.”
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