Information Aesthetics

Nice graphic shows the people, animals, and vehicles that travel with the United States President

Check out the cool projects from this workshop + conference at MediaLab Madrid.

Information:

Data visualization is a transversal discipline which harnesses the immense power of visual communication in order to explain, in an understandable manner, the relationships of meaning, cause and dependency which can be found among the great abstract masses of information generated by scientific and social processes. Born in the scientific field a couple of decades ago, the infovis, or datavis combines the strategies and techniques of statistics, graphic and interactive design, and computational analysis, in order to create a new model of communication, more adequate and revealing of the current age of complexity. (+info about data visualization)

The Visualizar project is an open and participative research project which will take shape through a series of activities that, on the basis of reflection and theoretical dissemination, will gradually be oriented toward the production and public presentation of new projects.

The project will get underway with a two-day conference to be held in November 12th and 13th 2007 with presentations by invited researchers, artists and designers and communications selected in an open selection process. The projects to be developed during the production workshop that will take place during the two weeks immediately following the event will also be presented at the symposium. This workshop for the development of projects will adhere to the same open selection process structure and the selected projects must be open and collaborative in nature as they will be developed by work groups composed of collaborators from different fields.

Get a head start on next week’s assignment. Go to Assignment Docs page and download Project 6.

Also, class on Thursday is with Prof. Ohring to discuss and try out Many Eyes.

Email me with questions for Project 6 — but no last minute ones please.

PS: Check out this work by Paula Scher at a Chelsea Gallery. Thanks for the link Peter!

Check out the Luke Lab

Rev. Luke Murphy is an information-based artist whose work is united by common themes drawn from the impossible task of quantifying the elements of the psyche and spirit. He has a particular interest in the Gnostic gospels, Masonic ritual, religious paintings and digital languages - in effect, codes. Amorphous concepts are dissected and reassembled using the architecture of professional jargon and presentation techniques. Murphy’s incessant need to organize ostensibly promises the viewer the hope of discovering a pattern or the key to the code and ultimately a shorter route to meaning, understanding and mastery of complex situations and emotions. This attempt to draw the connections within amorphous subjects, which in theory should soothe the viewer by simplifying the complex, instead reveals more layers of anxiety. The work’s failure to deliver what they ostensibly promise is at once menacing and reassuring. Murphy has been producing and developing his work digitally since 1994 although a substantial portion of his work involves drawing and painting.

Rev. Murphy graduated with and MFA from SUNY Purchase after completing his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and a BS from the University of Toronto. He is the co-director of cabinetmagazine.org and a VP of Technology at MTV Networks Online.

The reading for Monday (11/12) is the following:

Tufte’s “Narrative of Space and Time” (xerox)
[Also, check out Tufte’s Web Site, particularly the ASK ET section]

UPD: Symmetry (p190), Five Hat Racks (84), and Mental Model (130)

Reading responses are to be submitted as comments below.

Apply for the ECO ICON Challenge. Deadline has been extended to NOV 12.

Here’s what you have to do.

BY 11/6:
Register for the challenge. Then start the application process. Do not submit it, however! Post your Eco Icon graphic and the answers to the entry questions to your website and send me an email with the URL.

ON Thur 11/8:
Discuss it with Brooke in class.

Monday 11/12:
ENTER TO WIN!

I will be catching up with grading over the weekend. Please be sure your WEBSITES are up to date and the correct link is here on this site (where: on the Class Pages page which is listed on the right under Pages cat).

For Monday, read the xerox handed out in class today titled “The Body and the Archive” by Allan Sekula in the book “The Contest of Meaning.”

We will meet in NS3001 in Monday to discuss this article along with the Gladwell article “Open Secrets” that you read last week.

Please come to class prepared to discuss with your readings.

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For more info on Galton’s composite photography:
1 2

And Bertillon’s classification and photo archiving methods.

For Monday, please review Lize Mogel’s work. Also, continue working on your “Quantities” project. Bring your work in progress to class and, if time, show Lize what you are doing.

NEW EXHIBITION IN GERMANY FOCUSES ON IDEAS OF CONSUMER:

On the occasion of its anniversary celebration 10 Years of ZKM in Hallenbau, A ZKM | Center for Art and Media turns its attention to the effects of net-based, global creation on art and society with the exhibition “You_ser: The Consumer Century.”

Over the past years, the ZKM | Media Museum has already presented in the context of its collection of interactive art, the largest in the world, the most important pathfinders and currents in participatory art of the twentieth century: Op-Art, kinetic and cybernetic art, Arte Programmata, Conceptual art, Fluxus, and Happenings, interactive computer-aided installations, and virtual environments. Instructions for use and changeable objects activate beholders.

In this way, you, the visitor, take part in the construction of the artwork. In the Internet, portals such as www.flickr.com, www.youtube.com, www.myspace.com; and virtual worlds, such as www.secondlife.com or blogs now offer a newly structured space for the creative statements of millions of people. The artist no longer has a monopoly on creativity.

Users deliver or generate the content or put it together. They become producers and program designers and thereby, competitors to television, radio, and newspapers, the historical media monopoly. Audience participation reshapes itself as consumers’ emancipation.

These transformations concern not only the global expanses of the Internet, but also the museum. It reacts to the changed cultural and social behavior and supports those tendencies, which, in an Enlightenment spirit, are applied for democracy and the idea of access to education for all.

The new installations presented in the exhibition transfer the potential for co-designing by the user that has been developed on the Internet into the context of art and allow the visitors to emancipate themselves.

They can act as artists, curators, and producers. The exhibition visitors, as users, as emancipated consumers, are at the center of focus. YOU are the content of the exhibition! The museum is bound to a fixed location and set times. Through the Internet, it can develop into a communicative platform independent of place and time. The historical model of culture, in which Darwinist selection takes place and only a few select find acceptance in its storage and distribution apparatus, embodied by the principle of Noah’s Ark, has been displaced.

The new Noah’s Ark of the Internet has an endless storage space, which, in principle, is open to all inhabitants of the industrial and newly industrializing countries.

Is this the new cultural space for the emancipated consumer, the visitor as user who will decide the fate of the twenty-first century, just as slaves, workers, and citizens as historical subjects have done in the past?