ICAM 40 / VIS 40: Introduction to Computing in the Arts
locative media | information visualization | database art | "data portraits"
While the areas of artistic research introduced in this lecture can be considered separately, they are also connected. Together they respond to the new availability of massive amounts of data as well as out ability to automatically capture data in a situations where it was not possible previously.
note: while I provided links to projects web site, often you can find short summaries and images of projects discussed in this class in the Media Art Net - a comprehensive resource for media and digital art.
Infovis
Since the late 1990s, information visualization (sometimes abbreviated as infovis) has attracted attention of many artists and designers; in this decade it emerged as one of the most dynamic areas of digital culture. If scientists use visualization as a tool to help understand data of all kinds, uncovering relationships and meanings in large sets of numbers, this is not necessary the aim of artistic projects which use visualization. By presenting familiar data in a new way, the latter may question society's accepted view of a particular phenomena, explore new aesthetic qualities of large bodies of information, and investigate new visual forms driven by data. Artists and designers also understand that particular visual form chosen for presenting data itself carries meanings and often try to find a particular visual form suited for data at hand.
Note that some of the most interesting artistic projects strictly speaking fall into the related areas of information design (or information graphics). While the two areas are very close, here is one way to differentiate between the two: information design is about explaining information which is already well understood to people by presenting it visually (for instance designing a subway map) - while info vis is about exploring the "raw" data by visualizing. Visual Thesaurus is a good example of information design since it visualizes well-known and structured data.
While many information visualization projects use visualization as the end in itself, infovis has also became a new common approach to present any information visually, and as such as it is used as a part in many digital art and design projects, including those centered on locative media, databases, and "data portraits."
A few representative info vis projects:
1:1 (Lisa Jevbratt, 1999)
theyrule 2004
visual thesaurus
anemone and valence ( Ben Fry)
Carnivore (2002, Alex Galloway and others). Note that one of the clients is by Mark Daggett (MFA from Visual Arts Department, UCSD)
History Flow (IBM)
respam (Alex Dragulescu and Tim Jaeger, recent MFA graduates, Visual Arts Department, UCSD)
Locative Media /mobile media
Locative media projects explore our new abilities to numerically capture an aspect of reality and our behavior - the locations and movements of objects, places, objects, bodies and media. (These locations are often recorded via GPS but this is not the only method). The process of adding geographical identification information to media is called geotagging.
Locative media projects often take form of maps (including maps produced by groups of people).
For a detailed overview of the history and concepts in locative media as well as good discussions of some of the projects below, see Beyond Locative Media by Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis. They quote the 1999 Headmap Manifesto by Ben Russell which outlined the main ideas around "locative media" (the term itself was coined later):
-Location aware, networked, mobile devices make possible invisible notes attached to spaces, places, people and things.
- Real space can be marked and demarcated invisibly.
- What was once the sole preserve of builders, architects and engineers falls into the hands of everyone: the ability to shape and organize the real world and the real space.
- Geography gets interesting.
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Cell phones become internet enabled and location aware, everything in the real world gets tracked, tagged, barcoded and mapped.
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Overlaying everything is a whole new invisible layer of annotation. Textual, visual and audible information is available as you get close, as context dictates, or when you ask.
Note that some artistic projects do not use the new technologies (such as GPS) directly but rather reflect on how these technologies affect culture, society and our understanding of ourselves.
comprehensive list of locative media projects online
sample of the current cultural activities around locative and mobile media - Julian Bleecker's blog
sample projects:
Field Works (1992-, Masaki Fujihata): Field-Work@Alsace
Amsterdam real-time (classical "early" project)
MILK (later project involving some of the same people)
The Unseen Video
Urban Tapestries (classical "early" project)
Google Earth
NYC Surveillance Camera Project
Database art
In contemporary society a computer database has become the most common way to organize and store information. What are the politics and aesthetics of a database?
the term probably was first coined in my article Database as Symbolic Form (Manovich, 1998)
recent exhibition of database art: database imaginary
example of "database art" project:
soft cinema (Manovich and Kratky, 2002-)
"Data Portraits" / "data diaries"
As more and more communication passes through computers and electronic devices connected by the network, we leave "digital traces."In some cases this is the actual information: old emails, records of chat sessions. In other cases it is information about information (i.e. metadata): for instance, times and durations of telephone calls, the number of files exchanged or emails sent. In some cases this information is recorded automatically by the devices; in other cases you have to activate a device or set up a system (for instance GPS, sensors, etc.). And of course government agencies and private companies collect vast amount of information (of both kinds) on us: video surveillance, credit card transactions, etc.
"Data portraits" is my term to describe projects which take advantage of this new wealth of information about people's everyday lives which is already available or can be recorded.
examples:
MyLifeBits (Microsoft)
Reality Mining (MIT)
Data Portrait Study Series (MIT)
Meta-portrait (Manovich, 2003 - project proposal - not implemented)