written by Mitchell Whitelaw
shared by john on September 13th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
A critique of data art from the author of the blog “the teeming void” (http://teemingvoid.blogspot.com/) Originally linked from the following post:
http://teemingvoid.blogspot.com/2007/09/against-information-data-art-critique.html
(See: data visualization)
September 14th, 2007 at 1:20 am
a discussion here about data visualization is long overdue! are there other critiques? i think i’ve read a few critical takes on data viz from media arts scholars, but something feels wrong about them (maybe there’s an implicitly modernist perspective?) - what about from traditional arts? architecture?
i thought there were some interesting points — near the end, his meta-approach of “data about data” seems so optimistic (we can finally break from staring into the bright data lights and be “self-reflective”) … but somehow the discussion is still fixated on data… and if not data, then data about data… context is reduced to data about data.
maybe discussion about data visualization needs to move beyond critiques of positivist science to include perspective about the role of the producer of the visualizations, and under what circumstances they’re distributed, displayed, or interpreted. i’ve been trying to convince other data viz people i know to make an activist consultancy that produces work for specific movements or issues… or artists who take the baggage of aesthetic theory into the sciences and makes those science graphics/ animations (where images are produced without an aesthetic discourse to handle them).
anyway i appreciated the essay - especially his insistence on considering the producer of visualizations as part of the information they’re representing - maybe by setting the terms of his argument as data and information we never really get to the cultural role that data/ information play and where artists/ designers are involved?
September 14th, 2007 at 1:30 am
i meant to add alain badiou’s 15 theses on contemporary art to the library a couple years ago!
less for pronouncements about art than for a more open reflection on data visualization (through mark lombardi)
15. It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.
not really relevant to this text, but maybe a branching off point
September 14th, 2007 at 10:49 am
well in architecture there has for a while been a critique of ‘indexicality’, ie turning the building into a pointer to other things ['data', whether it is intersecting grids or the sonic waves hitting the building] or the simple display of data on LCD screens [e.g., the screen is red so 500 people are in the building now]. I think in a way this critique comes from a specifically post-modernist perspective, in that there is a recognition that simple transparency is not enough. I think data is much more interesting when distortions are introduced, and not necessarily the type you talk about [where the 'activist' position is always already recognized and emphasized -- isn't this just an added level of transparency?].
haven’t read the critique yet though so this is right now just a response to your response
September 14th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
i can imagine how the mapping of data onto buildings is a pretty uninspiring take on data visualization.. at the same time, distortion as you’re describing it seems a lot like a layer on top of transparency, an anxiety over the impulse to show something, a deliberate obfuscation for the sake of … poetics? maybe that’s my point, the field of data visualization projects extends from naive attemps to uncover truths to banal exercises in avoiding meaning (while insisting on using data and making us aware of that fact). or that’s my perspective on how the data viz conversation goes - putting transparency and interpretation into an antagonism with one another. i was just thinking of another way to look at it. maybe resisting the truth claims that we understand data visualizations making isn’t a matter of making unresolved graphics, but making new relationships between the producer of the images and the public who uses them? something just seems super fishy about “introducing distortions” - - it sounds reactionary (almost apologetic for working with data) — is it possible to introduce distortions before starting? (admittedly my activist dataviz consultancy is probably not the way to do that)
September 17th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
artist owen mundy just sent me a link to this critique of data art…
which also reminds me of a longish conversation on tom moody’s weblog about XYZ art (i posted on that thread as spd)
September 18th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
I learned a lot about data art from this critique, though admittedly I knew next to nothing about it when I started.
I think I basically agree with you, Sean, regarding the state of data art — naive and idealistic truth-seeking at one end of the spectrum, opaque, cryptic, and sort of onanistic on the other — and the whole enterprise feeling kind of detached, formal, technical, and hermetic. The emphasis on annihilating the informational content from various datasets and returning them to something like an abstract, “natural” state seems to engender works that prioritize surface over depth and context.
But Whitelaw makes a good point at the end of the piece, one that you touched on when you mentioned “data about data” — the artists’ processes, their paths through the infinitude of possibilities in the completely arbitrary realm of digital information, are themselves encoded in the work. I think at this level of metadata, by offering strategies for cutting away the “well-formed messages that dominate our experience of digital media”, data art might have a chance of transcending the simple positivist critique of data –> truth. The artists are striving to swim around in the data, to know it intimately, and to learn to see it with new eyes; they can report back to the rest of us and help us to learn to do so as well. I think those skills are going to be an important part of being an enlightened subject in upcoming years.
September 26th, 2007 at 11:23 am
Here’s one of the papers cited in Whitelaw’s critique:
Aesthetics of Information Visualization by Warren Sack
Haven’t read this yet. Maybe food for further discussion in there?