Imagining Data

An Exploratory Visual Approach to Abstraction

Nomadic 2010 Good afternoon! Let me too, start by thanking the Nomadic curators, Maria Strecht and Heitor Alvelos, for inviting me to this wonderful conference. Last year I had the pleasure to be among the audience, today Im honored to be here on this stage, addressing you.

Its not at all uncommon to relate art and science to imagination. From the last year conference, I hold in my head a strong image from the design 4 science exhibition.

One of its most iconic images, a neon sculpture design from the Why Not Associates Andy Altmann, quoted William Blakes famous dictum stating that What is Now Proved, Was Once Only Imagined.

Creativity, wether in the arts or the sciences, or even in design, which is my field of expertise, [ in fact and as a parenthesis: among the many statements, about the design discipline that I came to know, theres this one that I recently came across in a short essay by the Canadian designer Bruce Mau, featured in Warren Bergers book, Glimmer, and that states in its title that Design is The Art of Science. Mau, believes in the promise and potential of design to bring science and art together, in order to change the world. I dont know if design is in fact the art of science or if all together theyll change the world, I do like to believe it is so, nevertheless, I find the idea of standing in between disciplines appealing, and perfectly in tune with the nomadic spirit. ] Creativity, and now going back to my original thinking path, is strongly connected to the ability to imagine. As I stated in my talk synopsis, this time concerning science and going back to William Blakes formulation, part of the beauty of science lies in the way it is imagined, and in reciprocity certainly also in the way it imagines and makes itself and its concepts tangible visually, through wonderful and compelling images. Some of those images are overtly poetic, others are strictly objective translations obtained through technological probing, but almost all of them bear witness not only to a will to illustrate or portray specific scientific concepts but specially a will to enquire and explore.

Images of Science and images of Art can easily be the very same thing, we just have to think for example of Leonardos anatomy studies. In other instances as portrayed above in Rembrandt van Rijns masterpiece of the seventeenth century, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, Art finds its subject in scientific acts. As I wrote in data-driven about the depicted painting, the will to shed light over obscurity, or the will to dissect data into information and knowledge is deeply rooted in scientific reasoning. I like to think of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, as an hallmark of science imagination and as the way science portrays itself to us through data-driven imagery. The painting bears witness to scientific grounds in actual proof, which in this specific depiction is obtained via forensic means in a public dissection, by Amsterdams Chief Anatomist Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. The corpse laying in the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons' medical theatre, a convicted criminal executed for armed robbery the very same day, is part raw data and part information visualization. Dr. Tulp holds the visualization rendering at the tip of his clamp while guiding the group of curious scholars over the muscular visualization particularities. Rembrandt's masterpiece seems to lay in between the photographic and the illustrative. The social mechanics of the painting composition are as complex as the depicted muscular visualization or perhaps even more. After all we cant quite discern the politics behind every characters inclusion in the painting, while the corpses arm anatomic representation, as disputable as the muscular rendition can be, poses as a truthful anatomic visualization of the mechanics of the human arm. The muscular visualization is the result of an exploratory probing in the bodys raw data in order to unveil information and ultimately knowledge, that knowledge being a direct consequence of an anatomy lesson through visualization. A looking in, inside our own body, that seems to be universally tied to a will to look further and also out and beyond, in order to reach the unexplored, the unknown.

Caspar David Friedrichs The Polar Sea painting pictured above bears some similarities to a synthetic 3D computer rendering of a multi-planar surface disaster, in fact the painting portrays a shipwreck and is also known as The Wreck of Hope in reference to an early North Pole Expedition. The nineteenth century painting was used in a presentation made in The University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005 by the artist Lisa Jevbratt, author of several important visualization projects, her talk was titled: A Prospect of the Sublime in Data Visualizations. Jevbratt made use of Caspar David Friedrichs The Polar Sea painting, among other images, to illustrate a classic romantic idea of the sublime. This image, portraying the inhospitable, the will to reach the unreachable and do the impossible, the attraction for the void, as Jevbratt puts it, a driving force to look out and up, is a direct reflection of the way we contemporarily also look down and in, through all sorts of technological probing, wether directed at the world we live in, the structures we create and build, or to our own bodies.

The image above is generated by The Infome Imager, a web visualization software project by Lisa Jevbratt that allows the user to create software robots or crawlers, that crawl the web gathering data that then visualizes in an image as the one depicted, the image works also as an interface to access every place that the crawler visited. The INFOME Imager, (and the word Infome is a conjunction of the word INformation and OME, a suffix that means all or the totality of), the infome imager begins crawling the web from a specified webpage defined by its user. We may say that the resulting visualization image of the network, as the one above, is filtered through a point of view, which in this particular case is the nomadic website. That image is a network visualization, or to be more specific, the nomadics website network visualized. Jevbratt argues that the datasets that we deal with today, like that one, have a similar aura and produce a similar sensation than the classical reach for the sublime and its implied datasets, and I quote: the datasets that we contemplate now when we are looking in and down at us, at the earth and our technologies, are of no less dimension, vastness and grandeur than the datasets that where the subject of the classical sublime: and that the 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 my case visualization. ( Jevbratt 2005 ) end of quote.

The way we look at this network visualization image, a visualization of our technological structures, a large set of pixilating color codes with a beauty of its own, is then supposed to represent the same sense of infinity that is, or was, to look at Caspar David Friedrichs The Polar Sea, at a Starry Sky, or if the network visualization doesnt quite make it for you in transcendence, to one of those complex image visualizations of the human genome. The classical gaze for the sublime in the look at infinity is then closely tied to the way disciplines in science or in the arts today, probe the colossal datascape and try to escape its complexity, outputting all sorts of visual imagery and other forms of data translations.

Now, let me provide you a little context in order to better our understanding of our the current relationship with data, its retrieval from databases and archives, its decoding or processing into information and knowledge and how it become so prevalent in our culture, and that to an extent that right now, a word as dry and cold as data, is all over the media and the publishing world in the form of buzzwords like beautiful data, data-flow, big-data, open-data, data.gov, etc., etc.

Victoria Vesna (2000), the editor of database aesthetics, states that we are currently immersed in the second wave of an information overload, and that this one is a real tsunami when compared to the first one, the not so distant invention of the printing press. ( And, as we look at the image above, we can sort of easily foresee the problematic that digital data poses to older media technologies, as the printing press. )

The commitment of knowledge to materiality such as printed books, paradoxically represents a phenomenon that goes back further in the past and that Brett Stalbaum (2004) refers to as the disembodiment of information. It is precisely phenomena such as the abstraction of real-world objects into discreet data and its information surplus, that is the distant root of todays duality debate between data laying around in colossal databases, and the reality to which they are supposed to refer.

Data, Information, Archives, Databases, what exactly are we talking about? They seem so many things in perhaps too many forms and nowadays also seem to be everywhere. What is a database and how entangled are its roots in our society? Let me start quoting Christiane Paul on that subject, she says "While a database is now commonly understood as a computerized record-keeping system, it is essentially a structured collection of data that stands in the tradition of 'data containers' such as a book, a library, an archive, or Wunderkammer. Every "container" of information ultimately constitutes a dataspace and information architecture of its own, even though its characteristics are quite different from the virtual dynamic dataspace." (Paul, 2007)

And Selena Sol, on a very interesting perspective, goes even further back (and Im quoting) to a "time, in the primitive and barbarian days before

computers," in which "the amount of information shepherded by a group of people could be collected in the wisdom and the stories of its older members. (that is to say, databases as people) In this world, storytellers, magicians, and grandparents were considered great and honored storehouses for all that was known.

Apparently, and according to vast archeological data, campfires were used () by the younger members of the community to access the information stored in the minds of the elders using API's such as public String TellUsAboutTheTimeWhen(String s);. And then of course, like a sweeping and rapidly-encompassing viral infection, came agriculture, over-production of foodstuffs, and the origins of modern-day commerce." (Sol, 1998) And, keeping-on on the wonderfully simple, yet so clearly legible formulation, that Sol's reasoning is, I would add that after the modern-day commerce came wealth, and with wealth more data, and writing to cope with it, and books to cope with writing, and libraries to cope with books, and very smart systems to retrieve those books and the data in them from the constantly growing libraries, and then finally, the computer. (That deals with huge amounts of data and at the same time sort of democratized or turned the data production more, lets say, universal.) Quoting Sol again "Almost instantly, the computer was applied to the ageold problem of information storage and retrieval. After all, by World War Two, information was already accumulating at rates beyond the space

available in publicly supported libraries. () Information was seeping out of every crack and pore of modern day society." (Sol, 1988) To Lev Manovich, one possible characteristic specific to the database would relate to, and I quote, "such terms as scale, complexity, size and density" and goes on stating that, "one essential difference between a computer database and earlier similar forms for organizing data, such as a picture album, catalog, an archive, a library, and encyclopedia, is that the earlier forms still have a human scale. They contain a limited number of records, which a user can directly access. One can turn the pages of an album, walk through an archive, browse through a library. In other words, the human body is still sufficient as an interface." (Manovich, 2000) The information tsunami overflow that asks for the development of a specific "philosophy in relation to handling large amounts of data" (Vesna, 2007) has also specific conceptual implications that soon arise in different practices concerning database exploration, most of them implying a visual approach to data with or without the will to inform, and particularly those involving networked technologies and thus dealing with significant amounts of data. This problematic is particularly pertinent to artistic exploratory approaches to the database, developing strategies that provide new contexts and emergent meanings through direct interaction with rich and complex data-sets. Wether critically engaging on the sociopolitical or socioeconomic aspects of the database, that is seen as a repository of the world's dynamics, or exploring the relationships between the virtual data-bodies of information, ( that is to say data in digitized form ), and their impact on physical materiality, the previously hidden complexity pertaining databases, ( so large that exist beyond human perception on a 'nonhuman' scale ), (Manovich, 2000) is finally being scrutinized and revealed, most of the time through extremely creative visualization practices.

All Streets is a Ben Fry piece from 2008 that represents all the streets in the lower 48 United States. The result is an image with 26 million individual road segments portrayed above.

Alex Dragulescus Spam Architecture (2005) image series are generated by junk mail input.

Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus by Julius von Bismarck and Benjamin Maus (2009) is a data-driven storyteller. The drawing machine correlates keyword text from bestselling books with a database of several million patent drawings and cross-references from the United States Patent and Trademark Office into a continuum of plotted patent art.

Portrait (Rembrandt) is in Salavons words an atmospheric meta-protrait. The image pictured above is the result of an amalgamation of all of Rembrandts portrait work, it makes use of a mathematical meanaveraging process to obtain a single image. Portrait (Rembrandt) is the average portrait of all Rembrandts portrait oeuvre.

So, to summarize this talk, a wandering through imagination, creativity and the exploration spirit that is revealed through a fundamental interest in what surrounds us and within our own bodies, wether compelled by a will for the sublime or other human transcendencies, and almost always conveying our will to see in a strong desire to express things in all sorts of visual manifestations. Im inclined to think that somehow, visualization images can be an attempt to escape the deep complexity of their origin in massive amounts of raw data and that the manner in which that data becomes information, through the understanding of its relations, or knowledge, through the understanding of its patterns, or even wisdom, through the understanding of its principles is deeply rooted in the way reality is abstracted and disembodied through different codification technologies. The process of imagining that data and turning that abstraction into visual understanding, is a recoding back to some sort of tangible reality.

Closing the loop, I go back to Caspar David Friedrich romantic take on the wanderer that you can see above, and may the nomadic spirit across disciplines and boundaries prevails.