Public data visualization: Dramatizing architecture and making data visible (original) (raw)
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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.
Ambient Data Visualisations in Public Spaces
Data visualisation systems have traditionally been found in the realm of analytically driven information graphics. They are often designed for use in expert contexts, which do not always lend themselves to a broad range of user populations. Scholars in the field of data visualization such as Michael Danziger have identified that in an increasingly digital society where data is readily accessible, design theory largely ignores the non-expert audience and general public. This paper examines how ambient data visualisations invoke engagement with the public using site-specific installations. This research examines alternative ways to present data visualisation to a wider audience, and in particular, how ambient displays of data visualisation in public spaces can engage a broader population. The benefits of this address the current imbalance of data visualisations privileging an expert audience. Two case studies examined in this paper: L.A Interchange and E-Tower. They are analysed through concepts of the philosophy of Slow Technology and ambiguity in design. The results of these case studies show evidence to support the design theories of Slow Technology and ambiguity in design as effective means of engaging the general public with data-driven ambient displays. This research reveals situations in which the theories of Slow Technology and ambiguity in design have been executed in public spaces as a way to actively engage the general public in reflecting on data. For designers and artists, this combinatorial approach highlights an effective means of thinking about the creation of ambient data visualisations in public spaces for communicating data driven ideas to the public.
Inscribing a Square: Urban Data as Public Space
2012
This book investigates experimental and artistic forms of inquiry for making sense of the city, exploring the sensory, structural and cultural aspects of new urban systems literacy - a re-examination of what constitutes public space in the real-time city.
Situated Installations for Urban Data Visualization: Interfacing the Archive-City
Visualizing the Street: New Practices of Documenting, Navigating and Imagining the City. Edited by Pedram Dibazar and Judith Naeff. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018
We propose a set of analytical concepts that help analyse how media/ interfaces situate us within our cities and in connection with the invisible digital data that surround us. We recognize a set of architectural, cartographic and archaeological principles that structure the way the interfaces allow us to navigate the city as an emergent and layered data archive. These concepts help us investigate how interfaces not only communicate data as information, but, more importantly, structure, if not control, our agency within the visual regime that they sustain. Moreover, they help to understand and articulate how creative and critical artistic practices in the spaces of our cities contribute to public debates about the significance of digital data in contemporary society. Keywords: data; visualization; archive; urban interfaces; installation; performative archaeology
Exploring the role of data-supported social interaction manifested through public displays
Proceedings of the 4th Media Architecture Biennale Conference on - MAB18, 2018
This paper presents the early findings of studies in the role of data informing the interaction between the user, public and public display. It focuses on exploring how different strategies amplify and stimulate these datasupported interactions. Building on the work by Tomisch et al (13), we establish a taxonomy for databased features under the category of key elements in urban visualisations: 1) addressed topics, 2) input technologies, and 3) visualisation output. We analyse how these factors facilitate social interactions meaningfully through case studies of previous projects developed and implemented by Media Architecture research community. We suggest that data properties and manifestation play a significant role in 1) sustaining attraction to passers-by 2) enriching public understandings of display, and 3) encouraging diverse participation.
Light, Data, and Public Participation
Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 2012
As practices in reactive architecture and locative media converge and urban screens and projection technologies proliferate we are increasingly able to interact with data in public space. This confluence presents us with modes of digitally mediated participation in urban space that highlight bodily and architectural relationships with data rich environments as well as new sets of problems and possibilities regarding aesthetics, poetics, and politics. The article will analyze works by Alfredo Jaar, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, as they respectively exemplify the efficacy of the key components of public data visualization: mapping, expanded presence through architecture, and the ‘incompleteness’ and participatory nature of relational aesthetics. A more recent example, the E-TOWER project, an interactive data visualization project of Toronto’s energy visualized on the CN Tower for Nuit Blanche 2010, will also be examined as a form of collective participation in public data visualization. These projects provide the case studies necessary to reflect on the concept of the public, the potential of relational art strategies and the utility of play strategies for combining visualization and public space in order to enrich these spaces through the dramatization, problematization, animation, and relation of people, places, and data with from-a-distance interaction and urban screens.
Curating the City: Urban Interfaces and Locative Media as Experimental Platforms for Cultural Data.
116-129 in: Rob Kitchin and Sung-Yueh Perng (eds.) Code & The City., 2016
This article establishes three main arguments centred on these themes. First, we propose that the analysis of media artworks, installations and other locative-based media projects bring different conceptual and theoretical tools to the already growing fields of software studies (Manovich, 2013) and the relationship of code and algorithms to cities and the built environment (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011). As multi- screen, site-specific, social and participatory ecosystems, which work according to the dual principles of physical touch and, what Verhoeff and Cooley (2014) have called elsewhere, haptic, gestural “looking”, Saving Face specifically and other artworks more generally offer a context for reflecting on the movements of people and the circulation of data and images across platforms, the urban context as living and layered archive, and the activity and gestures that are elicited by a variety of screen-based, cultural interfaces. Because it allows the mobile subject in public space to engage in the process of creation and dissemination of images, the artwork enables us to consider the specificities of current uses of mobile, interactive, and networked media. It presents these as a process, an operation, and a working-with technology on the one hand, and as a communal, collaborative, and public engagement on the other. As such, the work is what it does, or, if you prefer, it does what it is. Second, the concerns of software studies and the programmable city are reflected back into media artworks themselves, as they offer potential to test the limitations of affordances, play with possibilities and engage embodiment and performativity at a stage of temporary reflexive impasse – wherein the artwork occupies a theoretical as well as material space. In this way, as a theoretical object – or object to “think with”, Saving Face can be used to interrogate how urban projects can be understood as (curatorial) laboratories for embodied criticality. It is an allegorical example of design, and an example of theoretical analysis. Indeed, the work is reflexive. It proposes itself as embodied thought, not only on interactive screen media, but also on a cultural understanding of the physical or material, as well as networked connectivity. It experiments with its technological affordances (Gibson 1979). It conducts such an experiment in that it works to critically expose how these affordances operate in the act of working with them. At the same time Saving Face experiments with ways of addressing the social questions about subjectivity and visibility within a connected and participatory framework raised by the potential of its individual affordances. Thus, Saving Face can also be considered as performative and experimental, in the sense that it makes that which it analyzes. This performative potential is the “message”, one could say, in McLuhan’s terms – or, arguably: the medium is the method (Verhoeff, 2013).1 Thirdly, this article addresses some theoretical underpinnings of an analytical approach to understanding how location-based media, or urban interfaces, layer urban spaces. It sketches some thoughts about a potentially critical-analytical approach to the "cultural interfaces" (Manovich, 2001) of current urban projects that use location-based media, and it offers an approach to understanding these projects as curatorial machines for cultural data. To do this, we zoom in on efforts such as Saving Face to provide access to data and their collections – whether or not instigated by museal and archival institutions or whether more bottom-up, civic collaborative projects. These works, as theoretical objects allow us to investigate layering as a design-principle for urban interfaces as navigational laboratories.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
This paper presents ATHsENSe, a multisensory interactive installation art project employing ubiquitous computing technologies, various sensors, virtual reality interfaces, multi-channel audio displays and interactive light structures. The project explores the concept of a smart city, through creatively translating the urban data produced by the environment of Athens and by its citizens. ATHsENSe is implemented through ubiquitous computing infrastructure, combining the use of sensors, location-based technology and mobile devices, in order to form a network of human and non-human sensors across the city. This structure enables the acquisition of rich urban data, which are eventually creatively translated in different artistic multisensory representations, displayed in physical and virtual space.
Creative Urban Methods for the Datafied City
Amsterdam University Press eBooks, 2023
Datafied and smart cities produce some challenges for inclusive, resilient, and sustainable urban futures. How can creative methods contribute to thinking and designing ways to imagine and co-create datafied cities with and for participatory citizenship and values for inclusion and sustainability? This question is central to the agenda of the research group [urban interfaces] and their collaboration in interdicisplinary and transdisciplinary partnerships. Working with and around the concepts of participation, criticality and imagination, the group brings cultural inquiry into datafied cities together with a methodological inquiry into creative urban methods. In the following, we sketch this agenda and approach and some recent examples of what such creative methods may yield.
Digital Phantasmagoria: An Urban Space of Intensified Interaction
2010
This paper will investigate the relationship between public space and digital media and speculate about the possibility of using digital technology to reactivate public space. From the perspective of current trends in digital technology, the paper will relate Walter Benjamin’s speculations about a transformation of public space into a space of heightened interaction as well as Gordon Pasks’ installations in the 60s. “Flux Space”, an exhibition by Gernot Riether, Ruth Ron, Renate Weissenbock and Atsunobu Maeda at the Arthur Ross Gallery in New York in 2000 will be used as an example to demonstrate how public space might be reactivated using digital technology to intensify the relationship between the spectator and physical space.