Jewish Museum Berlin by Daniel Liberskind

Jewish Museum

Lindenstrasse 9-14
10969 Berlin
GermanyDaniel Libeskind 1998 (museum opened 2001)


Libeskind’s academic and intellectual practice culminate in this much-talked-about and unusual building. The design is based on a rather involved process of connecting lines between locations of historic events and locations of Jewish culture in Berlin. These lines form a basic outline and structure for the building. Libeskind also has used the concepts of absence, emptiness, and the invisible—expressions of the disappearance of Jewish culture in the city—to design the building. This concept takes form in a kinked and angled sequence through the building, orchestrated to allow the visitor to see (but not to enter) certain empty rooms, which Libeskind terms ‘voided voids.’ The ideas which generate the plan of the building repeat themselves on the surface of the building, where voids, windows, and perforations form a sort of cosmological composition on an otherwise undifferentiated, zig-zagging zinc surface.
If the intellectual narrative which generates Libeskind’s work is complicated and inaccessible to the uninitiated, the building itself should stir emotion in even the most casual visitor. The stark meeting of the zinc-paneled exterior and the sky and the sharp incisions of windows are somewhat forbidding—if beautiful."- http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/jewishmuseum/

Lev Manovich

Lev Manovich

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.”

Lisa Jevbratt

"Lisa Jevbratt's [work is] often are driven by the Internet data. Jevbratt received her training at CADRE.5 This program was created Joel Slayton at San Jose State University who was able to strategically exploit its unique location right in the middle of Silicon Valley to encourage creation of computer artworks which critically engage with commercial software being created in Silicon Valley for the rest of the world: Internet browsers, search engines, databases, data visualization tools, etc. With his ex-students, Slayton formed a “company” called C5 to further develop critical software tools and environments. Jevbratt is the most well known artist to emerge from the C5 group. While “software art” has emerged as a new separate category within new media field only about two years ago, Jevbratt, along with other members of CADRE community, have been working in this category for much longer. In their complexity and functionality, many software projects created at C5 match commercial software, which is still not the case for most new media artists.

In her earlier well-known project 1:1 Jevbratt created a dynamic database containing IP addresses for all the hosts on the World Wide Web, along with five different ways to visualize this information.

As the project description by Jevratt points out:
'When navigating the web through the database, one experiences a very different web than when navigating it with the "road maps" provided by search engines and portals. Instead of advertisements, pornography, and pictures of people's pets, this web is an abundance of non-accessible information, undeveloped sites, and cryptic messages intended for someone else…The interfaces/visualizations are not maps of the web but are, in some sense, the web. They are super-realistic and yet function in ways images could not function in any other environment or time. They are a new kind of image of the web and they are a new kind of image.'

In a 2001 project Mapping the Web Infome Jevbratt continues to work with databases, data gathering and data visualization tools; and she again focuses on the Web as the most interesting data depository corpus available today.7 For this project Jevbratt wrote special software that enables easy menu-based creation of Web crawlers and visualization of the collected data (crawler is a computer programs which automatically moves from a Web site to a Web site collecting data from them). She then invited a number of artists to use this software to create their own crawlers and also to visualize the collected data in different ways. This project exemplifies a new functioning of an artist as a designer of software environments that are then made available to others."
- Lev Manovich, Data Visualisation as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime

Infome Imager Lite

Web Visualization Software (2002 - 2006)

The Infome Imager allows the user to create "crawlers" (software robots, which could be thought of as automated Web browsers) that gather data from the Web, and it provides methods for visualizing the collected data. 

"The . project 1:1, created in 1999, consisted of a database that would eventually
contain the addresses of every website in the world and interfaces through
which to view and use the database. Crawlers (software robots, which could
be thought of as automated web-browsers) were sent out on the Internet to
determine whether there was a website at a specific IP address (the
numerical address all computers connected to the Internet use to identify
themselves). If a site existed, whether it was accessible to the public or not,
the address was stored in the database. The crawlers didn't start on the first
IP address going to the last. They searched instead for selected samples of
all the IP addresses, slowly zooming in on the numerical range. Because of
the interlaced nature of the search, the database could, in itself and at any
given point, be considered a snapshot or portrait of the Web, revealing not a
slice but an image of the Web with increasing resolution...

The image is composed of pixels each representing one website address stored in
the IP database. The location of a pixel is determined by the IP address it
represents. The lowest IP address in the database is represented in the top
left corner and the highest in the lower right. The color of a pixel is a direct
translation of the IP address it represents, the color value is created by using
the second part of the IP address for the red value, the third for the green,
and the fourth for the blue value. The variations in the complexity of the
striation patterns are indicative of the numerical distribution of websites
over the available spectrum. An uneven and varied topography is indicative
of larger gaps in the numerical space i.e. the servers represented there are
far apart, while smoother tonal transitions are indicative of networks hosting
many servers, which because of the density have similar IP addressesVisualization
The 1:1 and the Infome Imager visualizations are realistic in that they have
a direct correspondence to the reality they are mapping. Each visual element
has a one-to-one correlation to what it represents. The positioning, color,
and shape of the visual elements have one graspable function. Yet the
images are not realistic representations; they are real, objects for
interpretation, not interpretations. They should be experienced, not viewed
as dialogue about experience. This is interesting in several ways. On a more
fundamental level, it allows the image to teach us something about the data
by letting the complexity and information in the data itself emerge. It allows
us to use our vision to think. Secondary, it makes the visualizations function
as art in more interesting ways, connecting them to artistic traditions from
pre-modern art, such as cave paintings, to abstract expressionism, action
painting, minimalism, and to post-structuralist deconstructions of power
structures embedded in data. The visual look that follows from this thinking
is minimal. It is strict and “limited” in order not to impose its structure on its
possible interpretations and meanings. The visualizations avoid looking like
something we have seen before, or they playfully allude to some
recognizable form but yet slip away from it.
The abstract reality in which these images emerge is not a Platonist space of
ideal forms, and the images are not the shadows of such forms. The term
‘visualization’ is problematic, and would be beneficial to avoid, because it
indicates that the data has a pure existence, waiting to be translated into any
shape or sound (or whatever medium the latest techniques of
experiensalization would produce). The opposite view that argues that the
data is not there if we don’t experience it—could be fruitful as long as it is
not seen as a solipsist statement, but rather as a position more affiliated with
ideas from quantum mechanics. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle
implies that we can only be certain about something’s existence if we see it.
Everything else is known only with some degree of probability. In the first
of these arguments—the data-purist view, images are merely one possible
expression of the data behind it. The images get their meaning in a vertical
manner; the truth is in the data, outside the image, behind or below it. In the
second view, the contextualist stand, images cannot escape their context, the
methods producing them and the discourse they are produced within. They
get their meaning in a horizontal manner. The meaning is created from how
the image refers to its image-ness and the tradition in which it was created.
The most interesting examples of visuals displaying data, negotiate between
these opposite positions."
Inquiries in Infomics
Lisa Jevbratt (2004




DATA BEAUTIFUL - An Adventure in Info Aesthetics
Lev Manovich - From Jevbratt's website

"A Web crawler is beautiful. Quantitative data is beautiful. Multiple windows of GUI are beautiful. Email clients are beautiful. Instant Messenger is beautiful. Information is beautiful. 

Let the thousand data windows open; let the thousand gassian curves spring up; let the thousand pockets move through the network; let the thousand matrixes multiply themselves. Information tools and information interfaces is the future of aesthetics. 

Normally we think of Web crawler and data visualizations as functional tools. Web crawlers classify the Web; data visualization In contrast, we are told, art is non-functional. (Of course this rarely has been true: not only art routinely has been used to propagate various ideologies - Christianity, Capitalism, Communism - but artists also taught people how to interact with complex bodies of information. History of art is the history of research in information interfaces. Giotto was the leading information designer of his days.) 

So how can we make art out of a Web crawler and data visualization tools? In my project I de-functionalize them. 

Firstly, my Web crawler does not look for any particular "content"; its goal is simply to generate a data set, which will lead to a beautiful visualization. Whether this data set consists 

Secondly, I think of the "walk" crawler takes through the information space of the Web as an elaborate dance, and something beautiful in itself. In other words, the goal is to discover the beauty of the trajectory, rather than to treat this trajectory simply as a means to an end. 

Think of this as pure "data formalism." Modernists artists treated a figurative image as an abstraction, i.e., a collection of shapes, colors, lines which are arranged together and which also happen to represent some familiar reality. Similarly, behind the seemingly functional search trajectories and search results of Web crawlers lie abstract patterns, as beautiful as compositions of Kandinsky and Pollock, the shapes of Frank Gerry and Iseey Miyake, or the sounds of Philip Glass. 

Yet remember that this is just a first step towards discovering info-aesthetics. Ultimately we would not to submit information to the standards of conventional, classical beauty. Ultimately, we will have to discover what the new beauty of information is. It may turn out to have nothing to do with a smile of a girl on a beach or the shape of iMac or the machine-like sounds of Kraftwerk. If we are unlucky, it may be something that even our machines will find ugly. At this point, we just don't know yet."



Inquiries in Infomics
Lisa Jevbratt (2004)
Chapter in Network Art: Practices and Positions edited by Tom Corby,
Routledge 2005

"Infomics
Within the Infome, artist programmers are more land-artists than writers;
software are more earthworks than narratives. The ‘soil’ we move, displace,
and map is not the soil created by geological processes. It is made up of
language, communication protocols, and written agreements. The mapping 
and displacement of this ‘soil’ has the potential of inheriting, revealing, and 
questioning the political and economic assumptions that went into its 
construction. Moreover, this environment/organism is a fundamentally new 
type of reality where our methods and theories regarding expression, 
signification, and meaning beg to be redefined...

Imagine yourself flying over a landscape, your eyes following the mountain
ridges and the crevasses formed by water running down the slopes over
millions of years. (Figure 7.1) There are roads crossing the landscape, some
of them closely following the creeks and the valleys, some boldly breaking
the patterns of the landscape, laid on top of it as if drawn on a map. (Figure
7.2) There are circular fields, the result of the mechanics of manmade
irrigation systems, and oddly shaped fields wedged between lakes and
mountain slopes. It is a fascinating display of the interplay between nature
and culture, showing off the conditions of human life, our histories, and
philosophies of living and relationship to nature. Open any atlas and one
will see attempts to map this rich connection between geology and
anthropology. These images, the view from above and the maps, allows us
to see the layers of our environment, of how we have responded to the
geology, the climate we live in, and how we have manipulated nature
depending on our beliefs at different moments in time.
The Infome is made up of layers of protocols and languages, each
functioning as the nature, the conditions for the next layer, and all of them
together forming the conditions, the nature, which we relate to when
spending time in (for example by navigating the Web), or using (by sending
an email or transferring a file), the environment. We as people are expressed
in this environment as a collective through how we use it, just as flying over
a landscape reveals our cultures and their histories through the specific
placement of roads, the shape of the fields, and conglomeration of buildings.
In addition, we—humans —are also expressed in its very construction,
geology, and climate. We wrote its mountains and its rain....



The type of imagery produced in genetics and biochemistry, sometimes
called ‘peripheral evidences,’ are imprints of DNA and proteins.

 Two-dimensional polyacrylamide gelelectrophoresis, colorectal 

adenocarcinoma cell line

cDNA microarray. Daphnia Genomics Consortium.

These images are evidence of something outside themselves, something 

(truth?) that could be visualized in multiple ways. Yet, because they do not 

escape the methods used to create the imagery, what they articulate could 

not be said in any other way. Another beautiful example of this simple but 

complex type of representation is found on TV. The static we see on the TV 

screen when zapping through non-existing channels allows us to see the Big 

Bang, the birth of the universe (Figure 7.10). In the static, 1 per cent cosmic 

background radiation is hidden. The visual noise we see is not how we 

would choose to represent the Big Bang; it is not a visualization of it. It is in 

fact a direct experience of it...

A Shift

The trajectory through history to the computer as a symbolic manipulation 

machine led us through several more or less explicit mystical traditions and 

practices. It takes us from the Pythagoreans (500 BC) with their number 

mysticism and Plato (428-348 BC) and his ideal forms. It touches the 

universal art of Raymond Lull (1235-1316), a model of understanding that 

anticipated symbolic logic, and the memory art of Giordano Bruno (1548-

1600). These discourses served as a foundation for Gottfried Leibniz (1646-

1716) when he conceived of the lingua characteristica (a language that 

could formally express all knowledge), calculus ratiocinator (an allencompassing problem-solving machine/system) and his calculus.  

Leibniz’s work was highly influential on Charles Babbage (1791-1871) and 

his ideas leading to the Analytical Engine and George Boole (1815-64) and 

his theories of binary logic, both cornerstones in the development of modern 

day computers. The logic conveyed in all these traditions stems from a 

belief system where there are concepts and thoughts behind physical reality, 

a system of symbols more real than the reality experience by our senses. 

This symbolic layer can be manipulated and understood by modifying its 

symbols. There is a thought entity outside nature, a power that is either in 

the form of a god, gnosis, a oneness, or in the likeness of a god, as humans.

However, if computers are now the access-points to the Infome, and coding 

and code are processes and entities used to experience and manipulate the 

reality of a multi-layered environment/organism, then the metaphysical is no 

longer an all-knowing entity outside, dictating the system, but an 

emergence, an occurrence within it: a scent, a whisper, a path in-between 

for a shaman to uncover. And what she, or he, finds is not an absolute but a 

maybe, made of hints, suggestions, and openings."

A Prospect of the Sublime in Data Visualizations

(Slides and notes from presentation in Boulder 2005)

Lisa Jevbratt 2004/2005

"We look up at the starry sky and we sense a fear of not comprehending and being

engulfed, a fear of the unknown, and simultaneously we experience a longing for that

inaccessible, impenetrable darkness.

These are the classical visuals of the sublime. Images of a sense of grandeur we can’t

reach, which we can’t penetrate or grasp. It is in the very far distant, it is hidden in layers

of mist, or made inaccessible by a climate not suited for us, and it instills a sensation of

deep fear. Yet we urge for it, we are fascinated and attracted by it.

The datasets we are looking at now, data generated from looking in and down at us, the

earth and our technologies, are of no less dimension, vastness and grandeur than the

“datasets” that were the subject of the classical sublime: impressions of the nature out

there, the universe up there;  and the sensations of the sublime generated and described

by the romantic artist, philosophers and writers are of great interest to us when trying to

make sense of our datasets today whether it is through computation, analysis or, as in my

case, visualization.

Attraction/Repulsion

However, while the datasets of today are as substantial, complex and ungraspable as the

ones dealt with in the original romantic sublime, there is a difference in direction, and

also in the forces activated and the methods in which to engage the sublime.

In the original sublime the force operating in us is attraction. The object of desire is over

there, far away and we want to reach it. We want to go there, we are scared and

intimidated but our longing and effort is ‘towards’.

When our force (engine, energy, luck) fails the ship stops, it does not get closer. The

forces of nature push us away - we urge to approach.

One could say that the original sublime was the extreme tension, and the pain that tension

causes, of not knowing and wanting to know.

Now, looking in and down the force operating in us is reversed, its repulsion.

If the engine in a plane stops, it approaches the ground; the natural force is gravity and

we need to stay up and away. We are pulled down and respond by retracting. The forces

of nature pull us down and in, and we urge to repel.

The sublime now is the extreme tension, and the pain that tension causes, between

(hypothetical) familiarity - the earth is our home, the cells and DNA are in our bodies, the

networks are our creation - and a methodological distancing.

Let me explain this a little further using this slide.

True) <- (We   =   (False -> We)

The original sublime operated in an epistemological and ontological condition in which

there was a separation between us and whatever it is was we wanted to know something

about, just as it was a split between culture and nature. And, we were certain there was

something to know out there, outside ourselves and to be able to gain knowledge about it

we needed to approach it. Today, we have a somewhat inverted epistemological and

ontological condition and thus the sublime that operates within it is an inverted sublime.

We know now, learning from fields as varied as post-structuralism and quantum physics,

that we are always part of the system we are looking at. The way we look at something

changes the thing we are looking at. We also know that, by looking at something we will

potentially know less about it. I recently heard an astronomer mention in a talk that we

know approximately what 3 percent of the universe is, what it consist of. Just a few years

ago that number was 5 percent. The logical response to this inverted

epistemological/ontological condition is that we now need to retract. Not approach.

In the original sublime we wanted to go “there” because we wanted to know.

In the inverted sublime we don’t want to go there because we don’t want to not know.11

So why are we trying to find methods that are allowing the sublime to operate today?

And what could those methods be?

Esthetic decision-making

In the article “Systems Esthetics” from 1968, its author, Jack Burnham, wrote about the

new complex process or systems oriented society, culture and economics he saw

emerging: a new era in which a new form of systems analysis would be the most relevant

method for making understandings in any discourse. Burnham argues that because we

can’t grasp all the details of our highly complex systems (economical, cultural, technical,

etc), we cannot make “rational” decisions within them or understand them by analyzing

the parts or even the system.  The way to make decisions within them and to understand

them is by making more intuitive, “esthetic decisions”, a concept he borrows from the

economist J. K. Galbraith.

This idea has an intriguing parallel in the philosopher Emmanuel Kant’s reasoning about

the mobilizing effect the sublime has on our organizing abilities. Kant claims that in

experiencing the sublime, by facing large amounts of information, huge distances and

ungraspable quantities, our senses and our organizing abilities are mobilized. Contrary to

what might be believed, we feel empowered, able to make decisions, and capable to act.

This is of great interest to the field of data visualization. Many strategies for aiding

people in the task of turning any large set of data into knowledge assumes that they

should be presented less information and fewer options in order to be able to make sense

out of the data.

However, humans are capable of sorting through enormous amounts of visual

information and make sensible and complex decisions in a split second, (the ability of

driving a car is one example). Supported by Kant’s idea I propose that under the right

circumstances, drawing on sensations of the sublime, people can, when faced with huge

quantities of data, be mobilized to make intuitive understandings of the data. Many

information visualizations, artistic or scientific, are a result of the mistake of compressing

the information too much and decreasing the amount of information through calculations

that embody assumptions that are never explained. The most common mistake in data

visualizations is not too much information but too little, their “images” of the data

landscape are not high resolution enough for an esthetic decision to be made."

John Simon

"(Simon's) work is unique for a number of reasons. First of all, he makes explicit connections in his pieces between the new ideas of new media and various traditions, movements and figures of modern art, in particular Mondrian, Klee, and Sol Levitt. Given that art world and culture at large are still largely treating new media as a phenomena in itself which has no connections to the past, Simon’s explicit and systematic explorations of conceptual linkages between new media and modern art is very important. In addition, while new media art field has been rapidly growing in size over the last years, and while artists in all disciplines are now routinely computer as a tool in their work, there are still literally only a few artists out there who focus on one of the most fundamental and radical concepts associated with digital computers – that of computation itself (rather than interactivity, network, or multimedia). Simon systematically researches how real-time computation can be used to create engaging artworks which are both conceptual and strongly material, offering the viewer rich visual experiences. In his earlier work online piece Every Icon (1998) and his wall-mounted pieces included in Bitstreams exhibition at the Whitney Museum (2001) Whitney uses real-time computation to create artworks that have a starting point in time but no end point; as the time progresses, they constantly change. While we can find certain precedents for such artworks in modern art (for instance, kinetic art, early computer art of the 1960s, and conceptual art), Simon pursues a unique strategy of his own: he uses artificial life, cellular automata and other computational techniques to create complex and nuanced images which combine figurative and abstract and which explicitly insert themselves within the history of modernist visual research."

Lev Manovich, Data Visualisation as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime

In John Simon's Art, Everything Is Possible

an article from numeral.com

Here's the rub: the newest work by John F. Simon Jr. will not be finished until long after we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Simon is the creator of "Every Icon," a thought-provoking work of computer-based conceptual art that was unveiled last month on the World Wide Web.
When first viewed, "Every Icon" looks deceptively plain, a seemingly simple square that has been partitioned into 1,024 smaller squares, 32 to a side. The monochromatic grid that results takes up about one-tenth of a monitor screen, a miniaturist's delight.
Loading a Web page displaying "Every Icon" launches a Java applet that, as it runs, begins to explore successively every combination of black and white squares that could occur within the confines of the grid's tightly circumscribed space.
As the tiny squares change from light to dark and back again, the black boxes appear to hop progressively toward the right. Over time, the grid will fill up and recognizable shapes, familiar images and perhaps even a little art are destined to materialize -- however briefly -- from the visual noise of the jitterbugging boxes.
Don't expect that to happen anytime soon, though.
On a reasonably fast Pentium-powered PC that can flash 100 different combinations per second, Simon estimated, it would take about 16 months to display all of the 4.3 billion variations on the top line of the grid. Because the number of possibilities literally expands exponentially, the second line would be completed in roughly 6 billion years.
Rounded off and expressed mathematically, the total number of conceivable variations within the grid is 1.8 multiplied by 10 to the 308th power (for purposes of comparison, 1 billion is a measly 10 to the 9th). For the grid to become totally black, the last "icon" that the applet is programmed to exhibit, Simon calculated that it would merely take several hundred trillion years.
"Because there's no word for that amount of time and no word for that large a number, several hundred trillion years is my way of making you think about a very, very long time," the 34-year-old artist said in a telephone interview from his Manhattan home.

"But in several trillion years, you might start to see something that looks like an arrow, or a square. You would arrive at something that was a skewed square, and then a few trillion years later it would be straight, and then a few trillion years later it would be crooked," Simon said.
While more computing power would hasten the process, it might also make the work impossible to see. "What does it mean to look at something that changes a billion times a second? It becomes a human perceptual limit," Simon said.
Given the cramped space, two-tone palette and strict rectilinearity of "Every Icon," anything resembling a late-period Monet is unlikely to wash over a retina anytime soon.
Even within these rigorously defined parameters, "Every Icon" will automatically generate more images than could possibly be assimilated in a lifetime.
"There was a lot of talk at the end of the 80's when post-modernism was emerging about how we've reached the end of imaging," he said, "and I wanted to show that even in a simple 32-by-32 space, the possibilities for imaging were vast."
Most of the images will have no value, a realization which in turn deepens one's appreciation for the range of choices that artists must confront and discard daily.
Simon asserted that today's trash could become tomorrow's iconic treasure. For example, a broken line might evolve in 150 generations to signify an international symbol of distress. "We could be looking at something that has meaning, but because of who we are and what we are now, we might not recognize it," he said.
"An autonomous image has lost its authority in a lot of ways these days," he continued. "A photograph can be manipulated, and we see so many images. Maybe I want to present the conditions in which an image can happen, as opposed to saying this is my image."
Musing on "Every Icon" as it flickers away in a browser window, one begins to sense that Simon's creation is much more than a cleverly constructed mathematical exercise or a modest electronic meditation on the eternal nature of the creative urge.
Indeed, the work is suggestive of the efforts of such well-known students of the square as Josef Albers and Paul Klee. Its closest affinity is to the kinetic colored compositions of Piet Mondrian, as found in "Broadway Boogie Woogie."
Sandra Gering, who will present a show of Simon's art in her Soho gallery next year, agreed. "I'm attracted to John's work because he is constantly looking back to go forward," she said. "For instance, he looks at artists such as Klee and then applies some of their principles to his own work. This brings a sense of art history to his pieces, even though they are technologically based."
"John is not caught in the trap of making work that is cold and removed, as so often happens with computer art," she remarked. "He is able to make especially powerful work using the new media because this is the tool that is most comfortable and natural for him."
Simon is a native of Louisiana, where his mother is a mathematician and his father is a judge. He learned to program while earning a master's degree in earth and planetary science at Washington University in St. Louis. He also holds a master's degree from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he later taught.
As a programmer, he has collaborated on the development of such high-profile Web-art projects as Jenny Holzer's "Please Change Beliefs,"Lawrence Weiner's "Homeport," and Kolmar and Melamid's notorious The Most Wanted Paintings.
Now, Simon is working full time on his own projects. "You get to an age when you're just going to try as best you can or you're not going to do it," he said. "I've made about $500 so far, which is more than I've made (as an artist) any other year. And I'm still going."
Simon is selling numbered, registered editions of "Every Icon" for $20, with the applet distributed via e-mail as a file attachment. Adhering to the economics of the Web, the cost is relatively low and the edition is unlimited. To date, there have been 16 buyers.
Because Java runs on multiple computing platforms, Simon also has installed a copy on his Pilot personal organizer. "I go to a party sometimes and people say, 'What do you do?' and I pull out my Pilot and say, 'This is my artwork,'" Simon related. "Some people go 'Oh, wow, that's incredible' and some people go 'When do I see a picture?'"
Simon acknowledged that "Every Icon" is a computer-based restatement of an idea that has been around a long time. He cited "The Library of Babel," as envisioned in the Jorge Luis Borges short story, an institution that contains every written word.
And there is the as-yet unfulfilled prospect that a cage of monkeys with typewriters and an infinite amount of time will someday pound out the complete works of Shakespeare.
Is "Every Icon" Shakespeare or, for that matter, Rembrandt? Let's hang out for several hundred trillion years and find out.

By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

Research

The Why Axis

"The Why Axis fills a gap in the data visualization community for solid critical analysis. By providing opinions on contemporary visualizations we can begin a dialogue about visual trends, best practices, and sound methods.

Through a regularly updated collection of case studies, interviews and analysis The Why Axis aims to enrich the discussion surrounding the current state of data visualization. Each project featured will be used to help uncover the attributes of a effective data visualization both in terms of aesthetics and functionality. All articles focus on larger data visualization projects, and when possible, illuminate the working process rich with decisions and compromises straight from the mouth of the designer. Our ideal visualization is visually refined, supremely useful and undeniably enlightening.
The Why Axis is operated by Bryan Connor, a designer and developer from Baltimore." 

Unfortunately I seem to have found this site in its infancy. Connor has already been analysing infographics but I can't find any solid critical theory yet.

Alex Dragulescu
'Spam Architecture'
"The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures."

Alex Dragulescu is a Romanian visual artist whose practice embraces both traditional and new media. His projects are experiments and explorations of algorithms, computational models, simulations and information visualizations that involve data derived from databases, spam emails, blogs and video game assets.
"...somewhere between pure art and information visualization" Dragulescu


Lise Autogena 
Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium

"Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium is an animated night sky that is also a live representation of the worlds stock markets, with each star representing a traded company. Fed by massive streams of live financial information, the stars glimmer and pulse, immediately flickering brighter whenever their stock is traded anywhere in the world. The stars slowly move across the sky, clustering together or drifting apart in response to the shifting affinities of their respective companies, growing or shrinking as the company’s fortunes change. Digital creatures, a form of artificial life, inhabit this world, feeding on the light released by the stars, breeding, dying and slowly evolving. while trying to learn to live in this strange artificial ecology into which they’ve been born.


The Stars

The planetarium displays listed companies as stars that drift across the sky in response to the complex currents of the market. The stronger the correlation between the histories of stock prices of any two companies, the more powerful the gravitational attraction between them. Whenever a stock is traded somewhere in the world, the corresponding star in the dome immediately glows brighter. A trade of a minimum of $700.000 will produce light in the planetarium - the brightness and duration of the glow indicating the volume of trading activity taking place. The stars in the planetarium slowly move across the sky in response to the currents of the markets - clustering and dividing according to the relationships between the companies they represent, while outlining the shapes of different industries and the huge multinational conglomerates like the signs of the zodiac. In this way, any general movement in a section of the market has a visible effect on the sky – a Parmalat scandal, or the recent collapse of Enron, for instance, would cause all the companies affected to glow very brightly and to be pulled towards each other into a very powerful vortex."

'I want to conclude by highlighting one aspect of the critical response to Black Shoals: that the project potentially runs the risk of hyper-aestheticism, particularly in that gallery viewers do not know quite what to do when first encountering the work. In this respect, the planetarium might be in danger of mimetically reproducing the mysterious operations of capitalism. Might we, though, turn this around and suggest that placing the viewer in a position of uncertainty is precisely the point? And that the project maintains a certain investment in denying the kind of mastery it initially seems to offer (with the capture of all of the world's major stock exchange data feeds in a containable physical space)? The planetarium dome reminds us of galaxies unseen; all we are offered is a kind of astronomic slice. As Jaime Stapleton notes in his response to the project, the biological "model holds out the possibility that it will provide a key that will reduce the messy, discontinuous, contingent and subjective experience of life into a regular, and mappable, set of operations... The promise offered by such a faith is that either through scientific rationality, or the intuition of beauty, an individual may attain a perspective unobtainable to the rest of society, and with it, a measure of power over that society." Black Shoals provides an implicit indictment of that conservative promise, that we await the one - a Neo character, perhaps, who is able to see the patterns inherent in the streams of data.' - Rita Raley, Tactical Media


Lise Autogena
Most Blue Skies

"Most Blue Skies is a computer generated project that attempts to identify “the most blue skies” in the world. The first stage of the project was exhibited at The Gwangju Biennale in South Korea in 2006. In the exhibition, a cluster of computers used live satellite data with advanced atmospheric simulations to continuously calculate sky colour for five million places around the world, while displaying ongoing calculations and a global map of sky colours. The name of the location of the current bluest sky was projected beneath a square wall illuminated by a specially developed lighting system reproducing the colour of the bluest sky in real time. Fed by live global atmospheric data, the installation calculated the passage of light through particulate matter in the atmosphere and calculated sky colours for millions of places on earth. By comparing millions of these calculations, the project identified the intensity and location of the “most blue skies” in the world."

Christiane Keller

"dataMorphose is an interactive installation which projects data into real space and visualizes it three-dimensionally. Information is represented by spanned and moving sails directly in the room. Thus abstract and virtual data becomes real and tangible. As the user takes new positions and perspectives, he can experience a completely novel and sensual perception of data.

Three spatial displays visualize statistical data, web activities and the current time. The coding and procurement of data is visualized by the tension of the canvas, the pace of movement, the position of the canvas and the change of their shape."

dataMorphose from Christiane Keller on Vimeo.


Christiane Keller - In The Future

In The Future 100×100 is a data sculpture which visualizes 100 years of forward thought. Using web-crawls of Google News, Google Blog and Google Scholar, the phrase “in the future” was associated with key words and phrases which reveal previous though about the future of our world. The top 100 terms for each year were categorized using the Dewey Decimal system, and mapped onto a grid. Holes were drilled into sheets of plexiglass whose sizes correspond to their frequency. For example, “war” is the biggest hole in 1945.

Christiane Keller - Bus Structure 2pm - 2am

A 3D data sculpture of the Sunday Minneapolis / St. Paul public transit system, where the horizontal axes represent directional movement and the vertical represents time. It is constructed of 47 horizontal layers, each forming a map of the bus routes that run during a given interval of time. Within each layer, every transit route that operates at that time is represented by wood balls placed at its scheduled stops, connected by the horizontal copper rods.

Christiane Keller - Tidal Datums

Tidal Datums is a wooden table whose form is inspired by the formal language of data graphics. The table is intended to be a representation of analytic information through the medium of furniture. Data graphs were gathered from NOAA’s historic tide database, more specifically the measurements of tides at San Francisco Bay over a 4 week period, and then translated into tangible material. The forms modeled from the data not only reveal a dynamic pattern, but also facilitate a “new way” of experiencing information by enabling a physical interaction of tidal patterns with the body.
The good thing about Keller's website is that, like David McCandless, he publishes his thoughts during the process of making, what he intends to communicate, diagrams, tests of materials and so on.