Landscapes of Feeling, Arenas of Action: Information Visualization as Art Practice (original) (raw)
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“Information Visualisation” was originally conceived to help scientists and engineers to search and scrutinise patterns in vast amount of complex data. With the development of technology and other creative factors, this had led some researchers, artists, and designers to go beyond the pixels into uncharted territory of physicality. This critical journal is a personal study of my five-week studio project that explores and investigate the role of aesthetic experience in interpreting complex information, particularly data, into tangible outcomes. My critical journal begins with understanding historical and cognitive aspects of information visualisation and how physicality, with the help of materiality and experiential considerations, provides the audience a tangible connection between knowledge and experience in the real world. Subsequently, I will analyse academic writings of physical visualisation while using case studies of contemporary works to highlight valuable insight to facilitate with my studio project. These insights established three distinct stages to create physical visualisations; collecting data from a local site, designing data visualisations from collected datasets, and physicalising data visualisations with Saussure's theory as a conceptual framework. Works produced from this studio project not only prove its novelty, but also illustrates how contextually related experiences can motivate the creative process to evoke emotional understanding within users. Throughout this process, prominent subject matters were also highlighted to serve as a plausible project brief for my final year project.
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2018
Weather Report is a site-specific art installation that entices visitors to examine climate change at a human scale, both physically and metaphorically. Weather data are displayed using balloons as physical pixels that can be touched, part of an effort to make objective, scientific data graspable by nonscientists. Visitors contrast these objective weather data with weather-related memories they enter at a kiosk to create a subjective weather record from the Twin Cities community. The historic Stone Arch Bridge, once the railroad gateway to the city of Minneapolis, crosses the Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls. Walking across this gently curving path on a warm June night, we hear the sounds of the Northern Spark art festival. Held each year in the Twin Cities, Northern Spark has grown to attract tens of thousands of people who view performances, explore temporary installations in the streets and along the riverfront, and gather for one night to experience art as a community until the sun rises. Looking down from the bridge on this night in 2016, colored lights flicker and reflect off the water, as a stream of local residents and visitors wind down from the bridge, through Mill Ruins Park, and along the walking path to what people are describing as the "balloon tunnel." More than 800 miniature weather balloons are suspended to form two walls that undulate, like air-filled sheets in the night wind. Both the balloons and the steady stream of visitors perform an animated dance as the Mississippi River flows by on a parallel course (see Figure 1). Our design collective, MINN_LAB, composed of architects, landscape architects, and computer scientists, created Weather Report in response to theme of "Climate Chaos | Climate Rising." 1 We identified common threads around the experience we wished to create: making climate personal and connecting objective scientific data to subjective human experiences. Then, over months of interdisciplinary design and discussion, we developed, interwove, and revised these threads drawing upon our plurality of design voices and different technical research interests.
SAGE, 2009
ABSTRACT This article describes an applied investigation into a concept of information visualization where data are not rendered as graphs, charts or diagrams on the screen but as a sensual experience beyond the screen in physical space. It introduces predecessors such as calm technologies and ambient displays among a number of poetic and applied examples from related backgrounds to establish the context and relevance for communication design and graphic design, and presents a current research undertaking in which the social activity of visiting a website is visualized in multiple sensorial modalities in real-time in the form of a kinetic and sensual display.
Interdisciplinary engagement through artistic visualisation
Original Citation
In the following paper I will examine what insights the information visualisation community could draw from studying how artists and other creative practitioners use visualisation as part of their work. After a brief overview of Viégas and Wattenberg’s analysis of artistic experiments with visual methods and tools, the paper attempts to resolve some of the problematic assumptions that underpin their analysis in the hopes of providing a more inclusive framework for understanding how visualisation can be used in other disciplinary contexts. In order to accomplish this, I argue that visualisation should be understood as both process and practice. The last section of the paper applies this framework to a case study in order to show how it might enable the information visualisation community to work with other disciplines.
Behind The Scenes at HCI's Turn to the Arts
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2015
Since 2000, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has seen a turn to the artistic, looking at more provocative, cultural and social experiences. In doing so HCI is increasingly collaborating with artists who engage with real world data. Much of this work focuses on engaging the public in the spectacle of interactive experiences. In contrast, this paper takes a look behind the scenes by studying a collaboration between artists, climate scientists and researchers as they designed a participatory sensing system to interpret scientific data for public presentation. This paper presents this crossdisciplinary approach from the perspective of an artist/researcher on the project.
Beyond the screen: visualizing visits to a website as an experience in physical space
Visual Communication, 2009
Beyond the screen: visualizing visits to a website as an experience in physical space Original Citation Hohl, Michael (2009) Beyond the screen: visualizing visits to a website as an experience in physical space. Visual Communication, 8 (3). began with a very traditional three-year apprenticeship as a graphic-designer in the town of Ulm, Germany and graduated in 2000 with a Diploma (MA) in Digital Media Design from the University of the Arts, Berlin. He worked as a media conceptionist beside his studies and holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. between fine art and computer sciences from Sheffield Hallam University. He is a research fellow at the Art and Design research department (CCI) of the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, exploring telematic visualisation technologies in physical space. Abstract This text describes an applied investigation into a concept of information visualisation where data 1 is not rendered as graphs, charts or diagrams on the screen but as a sensual experience beyond the screen in physical space. It introduces predecessors such as calm technologies and ambient displays among a number of poetic and applied examples from related backgrounds to establish the context and relevance for communication design and graphic design, and proceeds with presenting a current research undertaking in which the social activity of visiting a website is visualised in multiple sensorial modalities in real-time in form of a kinetic and sensual display.