Thursday, May 22, 2008

Infoaesthetics & Data Visualisation: The Expressivity of 'Virtual' Matter Itself

Information Aesthetics: Form Follows Data - Data Visualisation & Visual Communication (Infoaesthetics) is a blog dedicated to exploring the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualisation. Inspired by Manovich's definition, infoaesthetics relates to a series of new conceptualisations of form - emergent, distributed representation that is never fixed, within the set of parameters within software. (Data is to informationalism, what abstraction was to Modernism).



Bus Routes Data Sculpture - a 3D data sculpture of the Sunday Minneapolis / St. Paul public transit system, where the horizontal axes represent directional movement and the vertical represents time.


Infoaesthetics functions like an exhibition or art space, a project that has collated many different data collections & representations, such as the virtual mapping of human movement through space. As a blog, it is interested in data representations that acknowledge the importance of the emotional experience of users as information access is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our daily lives and therefore new approaches are required for information presentation which consider user engagement and visual aesthetics.



greenpix zero-energy massive LED display - the largest color LED display worldwide, & the first photo-voltaic system integrated into a glass curtain wall in China. the display requires zero external energy, as the facade harvests solar energy by day & uses it to illuminate the screen after dark.

Following a Deleuzian populist approach to art - artistic production, extended to include all forms of expressivity and creativity, is a capability of many more things in the world than humans or a specific group of humans - atoms, molecules, geological phenomena, animals. It also includes the expressive representations of visual data and the circulatory or distribution processes that create these emergent forms.

Wifi Geographical Mapping - a set of "semi-abstract" circular visualizations of the WiFi encryption levels while traveling through the cities of London, Vescemont, Belfort & Barcelona.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, and for Deleuze, there are strata of expressivity from simple to complex also.

I like the idea of virtual matter... isn't matter virtual anyway?