Expressive cartography and the aesthetics of public visualization (original) (raw)

Expressive Cartography, Boundary Objects, and the Aesthetics of Public Visualization

Leonardo, 2016

Aesthetic visualization projects that incorporate users, community stakeholders, multiple modalities and technologies necessarily emphasize the way that an artistic visualization can be both an artifact and a process-a conceptualization of aesthetic visualization that is useful for thinking about visualization in general. In this paper, the authors propose the concept of the visualization as boundary object, a move away from the indexical claims of visualization and instead towards an acknowledgement of the entangled nature of social, political, economic, cultural, technological and environmental actants. Through a description of the In The Air, Tonight public visualization project, the authors suggest that by making manifest the connections between these actants, a visualization project, as a form of expressive cartography, can contribute to the visibility of and engagement with important issues (e.g. homelessness) that affect society.

Thinking About (and with) Maps: A Reflection on Artistic-Activist Interventions in Contemporary Metropolises

Vibrant, 2019

Hegemonic maps that are guided by political, cultural, and economic interests, name and create visibility schemes that establish representations of goods and natural resources while simultaneously fixing and making invisible the social and spatial dynamics that characterize mapped regions and populations as unique. Many associations and artistic-activist collectives are concerned about this situation and its effects and have started to use open source software in order make visible a set of political issues that are hidden by "official" maps, geared towards control. With regard to this symbolic confrontation, the present article's main objective is to systematically reflect upon political and associative arrangements related to the contemporary dissemination of technological resources aimed at cartographic practices.

Creative Geovisualization: A Humanistic and Artistic Possibility with/in GIS, Mapping, and Geovisualization

Journal of the Association of Korean Geographers, 2016

Creative geo-visualization is the visual representation of creative forms of data and thinking with spatial information-visualization that preserves, represents, and generates a more nuanced, contextual, and deeply contingent meanings of place and people with humanistic and artistic approaches. Creative geovisualization expands the capacity of geovisualization and maps by building a new space that intersects digital spatial humanities, critical mapping, and the convergence of geography and arts. Various encompassing concepts and debates around non-representational theory, creative geographies, and deep maps and spatial narratives are discussed as a theoretical ground of this discussion. I also present diverse modes of creative engagements and practices as a newly generated form of geographic visualization, particularly through the use of emerging digital mapping technologies. Creative geovisualization allows us to go beyond the Cartesian understanding of space, and move towards imagining and producing qualitative, artistic, and humanistic visualizations that engage different forms of embodied, processual, relational, and even affective geographies. This reifies that the power of visualization and mapping are more than representation of reality, but becomes creative as it evolves in process and takes a creative turn.

Visualizing the Street New Practices of Documenting, Navigating and Imagining the City

Visualizing the Street New Practices of Documenting, Navigating and Imagining the City, 2018

From user-generated images of streets to professional architectural renderings, and from digital maps and drone footages to representations of invisible digital ecologies, this collection of essays analyses the emergent practices of visualizing the street. Today, advancements in digital technologies of the image have given rise to the production and dissemination of imagery of streets and urban realities in multiple forms. The ubiquitous presence of digital visualizations has in turn created new forms of urban practice and modes of spatial encounter. Everyone who carries a smartphone not only plays an increasingly significant role in the production, editing and circulation of images of the street, but also relies on those images to experience urban worlds and to navigate in them. Such entangled forms of image-making and image-sharing have constructed new imaginaries of the street and have had a significant impact on the ways in which contemporary and future streets are understood, imagined, documented, navigated, mediated and visualized. Visualizing the Street investigates the social and cultural significance of these new developments at the intersection of visual culture and urban space. The interdisciplinary essays provide new concepts, theories and research methods that combine close analyses of street images and imaginaries with the study of the practices of their production and circulation. The book covers a wide range of visible and invisible geographies – From Hong Kong’s streets to Rio’s favelas, from Sydney’s suburbs to London’s street markets, and from Damascus’ war-torn streets to Istanbul’s sidewalks – and engages with multiple ways in which visualizations of the street function to document street protests and urban change, to build imaginaries of urban communities and alternate worlds, and to help navigate streetscapes.

Visual Interventions in Public Space: the City as its Inhabitants Oeuvre

Políticas destinadas a consolidar o estado de centro de controle da economia global de São Paulo, empenham-se em limpar os bairros centrais, representativos de todos os elementos que não correspondem à imagem, assim aprofundando as desigualdades e exclusões múltiplas que marcam a vida na metrópole. O espaço urbano é vivido como espaço de constrangimentos, interditos, regras e normas. A própria metrópole, apesar de ser um produto social, aparece como potência estranha, aparentemente fora do alcance da intervenção criativa por parte dos indivíduos habitando nela.

Perspectives for a public space. Visualization visions images

SCIRES.it, 2020

The research investigates the contemporary urban space structuring through the Drawing and the Survey methods, as places for experimentation and control of the city transformation dynamics. The 19th century foundation orthogonal grid of the Bari city is assumed as an example, which reveals the dynamism of changes taking place on the historical settlement. Starting from the city representation, the visual qualities of some main roads, that originally constituted the perceptive support of the city spatial unity, are analyzed. The graphic reconstruction, obtained from the street fronts two-dimensional representation and from the public spaces three-dimensional survey, with the use of photomodeling tools and laser scanner technologies, has allowed a deep reading of the visual described aspects. The knowledge process, implemented in the representation space, drives the environment projects towards conscious choices that protect the fragile historical city.

Introduction: Visualising the City

2019

In 2017 the fifth iteration of the International Visual Methods Conference was held at the Singapore Institute of Technology. The theme, 'Visualising the City', brought together more than 110 participants from 26 different countries, with a combination of paper presentations, art exhibitions and walking workshops. Deliberately interdisciplinary, the conference theme sought submissions from the arts, humanities, social sciences and hard sciences. This special issue of Visual Ethnography follows on from the conference theme, in which the contributions, again drawn from a diverse set of disciplines, approaches and theories, considers how (and why) we visualise global urban environments, and what are the implications for such methods. In this introduction we reflect on the conference’s theme, keynotes and papers, and how these have led to the formation of the issue. We seek to contextualise the issue’s articles and photo-essays within theories of visual methods in the social sci...

Public Data Visualization: Dramatizing Architecture and Making Data Visible

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

Public data art's potential for digital placemaking

Tourism&Heritage Journal, 2019

Data-based public art is an innovating new form of digital art which presence is increasing in the cities datascape. Data as a medium provides a special relationship with time and space by connecting the context of data mining to the one of its exhibition. The virtual component of data art opens an augmented space, where the different dimensions of data are mediated. This essay analyses how this new art form can contribute to a creative and digital placemaking of a city by offering a special sensory experience as well as renewing the storytelling of its space. Three case studies support the analysis. "Living connections", projected on an emblematic bridge in Montreal, contributes to a spectacular placemaking. "Interconnected", a data sculpture in Charlotte airport, relates to infrastructure placemaking. Finally, "Herald/Harbinger" connects the industrialized society with nature in a global connection. The results participate to the reflection on the nature and specificity of data art as well as enhancing its potential of transforming public space by engaging a specific relation with time, place and people.

Cartographic abstraction : mapping practices in contemporary art

2016

This thesis proposes a theory of cartographic abstraction as a framework for investigating cartographic viewing, and does so through engaging with a series of contemporary artworks concerned with cartographic ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger 1972). Cartographic abstraction is a material modality of thought and experience that is produced through cartographic techniques of depiction. It is the more-than-visual register that posits and produces the ‘cartographic world’, or what John Pickles has called the ‘geo-coded world’ (2006). By this I mean the naturalized apprehension of the earth as a homogeneous space that is naturally, even necessarily, understood as regular, consistent and objective. I argue for identifying cartographic techniques of depiction as themselves abstract, and cartographic abstraction as such as the modality of thought and experience that these techniques produce. Abstraction within capitalism comes to be socially real and material, taking place outside thought. I propose...