(the teeming void)

Measuring Cup is a little dataform project I've been working on this year. It's currently showing in Inside Out, an exhibition of rapid-prototyped miniatures at Object gallery, Sydney.

This form presents 150 years of Sydney temperature data in a little cup-shaped object about 6cm high. The data comes from the UK Met Office's HadCRUT subset, released earlier this year; for Sydney it contains monthly average temperatures back to 1859.


The structure of the form is pretty straightforward. Each horizontal layer of the form is a single year of data; these layers are stacked chronologically bottom to top - so 1859 is at the base, 2009 at the lip. The profile of each layer is basically a radial line graph of the monthly data for that year. Months are ordered clockwise around a full circle, and the data controls the radius of the form at each month. The result is a sort of squashed ovoid, with a flat spot where winter is (July, here in the South).


The data is smoothed using a moving average - each data point is the average of the past five years data for that month. I did this mainly for aesthetic reasons, because the raw year-to-year variations made the form angular and jittery. While I was reluctant to do anything to the raw values, moving average smoothing is often applied to this sort of data (though as always the devil is in the detail).


The punchline really only works when you hold it in your hand. The cup has a lip - like any good cup, it expands slightly towards the rim. It fits nicely in the hand. But this lip is, of course, the product of the warming trend of recent decades. So there's a moment of haptic tension there, between ergonomic (human centred) pleasure and the evidence of how our human-centredness is playing out for the planet as a whole.


The form was generated using Processing, exported to STL via superCAD, then cleaned up in Meshlab. The render above was done in Blender - it shows the shallow tick marks on the inside surface that mark out 25-year intervals. Overall the process was pretty similar to that for the Weather Bracelet. One interesting difference in this case is that consistently formatted global data is readily available, so it should be relatively easy to make a configurator that will let you print a Cup from your local data.

This text was an invited contribution to Kerb 17: Is Landscape Architecture Dead? This looks like a rich volume with a sharp critical edge, and a swathe of interesting material spanning architecture, urbanism, art and landscape. Unfortunately my contribution was edited fairly severely; so here's the unabridged version. Redundancy warning for regular readers: there's a slight rehash of Watching the Sky in here; but afterwards there's fresh material on landscape / data projects by Driessens and Verstappen and Usman Haque.


Data is, we imagine, an immaterial thing; or at least ethereal, made of light and electricity, processed at superhuman speed, transmitted in real time. The everyday world we move in seems dense and slow by comparison. The landscape is slower again; thick, heavy and persistent. At the moment however those two domains, the fast lightness of data and the heavy slowness of the landscape, are urgently linked. We are faced with the prospect of momentous change in the landscape that is somehow both slow and fast; too slow for our real-time culture to grasp, and too fast for the living systems of the landscape to adapt to. This paper presents a handful of works that dwell in that disjunction, between landscape and data; not solving it at all, but at least forming links, complicating assmptions, and recasting the relationship between two terms that seem to neatly encapsulate our future.


In Watching the Sky a camera looks out my office window, at the sky and the landscape. A banal view over a university campus to a bushy ridge in Belconnen. The camera takes an image every three minutes; four hundred and eighty images in twenty four hours. Tethered to a computer, the camera records for weeks at a time; the computer accumulates thousands of images. I think of the images as data, traces of change in the world outside the office window. I visualise, or re-visualise, this image data in the simplest possible way; an automated process "cuts" a narrow vertical slit from the same location in each image, and compiles all these slits together (this is a digital imitation of an analog photographic technique known as "slit-scan"). In the rectangular visualisations the slices are tiled from left to right. In the radial visualisations slices are gradually rotated so that a twenty-four-hour period spans one complete revolution (the "seam" is at midnight).


In the resulting images the patterns of change within and between days are immediately visible. As I imagined, day and night, cloud and sky are obvious. The brief, delicate colour shifts of dawn and dusk were more surprising. Below the horizon, though, patterns appeared that complicated the work's nominal focus on the sky. It became clear that some of the richest and most revealing data here came from the landscape. In one of the earliest sketches I found small but distinct variations in the horizon line over the course of a day, and recurring on successive days. I eventually realised that this was caused by the afternoon breeze, shifting foliage by a few pixels within the frame. In other words, subtle changes in the material field of the landscape carried through to the image data. Moreover in many ways the landscape visualises its own internal structure: the trees blowing in the breeze are partly instruments, revealing material changes around them (the breeze); but also data, traceable as pixels. In many images the passage of a shadow across the ground appears as a recurring pattern, an enfolded or multiplexed representation of another set of material interactions; the landscape measures and reveals itself, but not as an object, image or view. It is a connective, dynamic, material system; what is revealed are the specific interactions of that system with itself. The image data acts as a kind of core sample, drilling through multiple spatial and material systems, but each is connected outwards, beyond the frame. The wind in the trees doesn't belong to this image, but like the angle of the sun revealed in the shadow, is an index of a wider system.

It also became clear that the landscape is densely packed with human, social data which is equally apparent in image data. In the rectangular visualisations presented here stripes of colour are visible towards the bottom of the frame. These are caused by cars, parked illegally under the trees; they form another ad-hoc graph that reflects cultural, institutional calendars and cycles, though again they are intermingled with other scales and structures.


Landscape is also cast as a self-revealing instrument in Driessens and Verstappen's Tschumi Tulips project. This landscape installation occupied the Tschumi Pavilion, in Hereplein, Groningen, during the northern Spring in 2008. The pavilion is a rectilinear glass container, rising at an angle from the surrounding park. In this installation the artists filled the base of this box with soil and planted over ten thousand white tulips. A matching array of tulips was planted outside, extending the line of the pavilion. Like scientists, the artists set up two identical subjects, but vary their environment: ten thousand tulips inside, ten thousand outside. A webcam reveals how these variations in environment are slowly materialised in the life of the tulips. The tulips inside grow, bloom and then, wonderfully, decay more rapidly than their twins outside. As in Watching the Sky, long time spans are compressed into human-scale time and space; and here too digital imaging plays a pragmatic role in that revelation. Deployed in rectangular masses we can easily read the flowers as abstract, sculptural materials; organic pattern and variation enframed and aestheticised. But at the same time the work has a kind of deadpan resonance, a rendition of life, and death, inside a greenhouse.


The Huey-Dewey-Louie Climate Clock, by Usman Haque and Robert Davis, addresses the long timescales of environmental change head-on in a proposal that further develops this articulation of slow data and landscape. The clock is a multi-layered system of autonomous machines and material processes. The "Huey" agent slowly builds "accretion mounds" using material extracted from the atmosphere and formed into accumulating conical stacks over the course of a year; like tree rings or geological strata these embed environmental materials directly into a designed representation. The "Dewey" element is a circular array of one hundred transparent containers, in which air and biomass samples are preserved year by year. Like Driessens and Verstappen's Tulips, Haque and Davis propose a biological instrument of one hundred genetically identical daffodils, which are sown and harvested each year, then entombed in the plinths - again a simple grid, a layer of invariance is imposed that allows the landscape to essentially represent itself, materially. Finally Louie, an autonomous solar-powered robot, gathers soil samples and compresses them into cubes, one per day. The surface of each cube is imprinted with some current data point - chosen by daily popular vote; perhaps oil price, or rainfall. So here fast, real-time, socially selected data comes to rest directly on the slow, material medium of the soil.

At one stage, not long ago, it may have seemed that we were leaving the landscape behind, or drafting it in only in as a support or substrate for the flickering patterns of real-time culture. Even now, that seems possible: the monthly figure for new housing construction, a bellwether for economic growth, is imposed on the landscape by earthmovers and roadbuilders, underscored by raw mounds of earth. The works presented here suggest an alternative role, perhaps an alternative future for the landscape; as slow data and slow instrument, a complex material system that can be subtly designed into self-revelation.

In case you missed it, Radiohead have gone all data-aesthetic with their latest video, House of Cards. What's more, it's fully zeitgeist-compliant, with open access and a call for re-visualisations of a quite massive dataset: hundreds of megabytes of spatial data gathered with various 3d laser-scanning rigs. If the download stats and early signs are anything to go on, we will be seeing much more of this dataset.

Watching the Sky is a data visualisation project I've been working on for the past six months or so. The work is almost ridiculously simple: slit-scan type visualisations of large image time-series, shot from the window of my Canberra office. All the images from this process are up on Flickr. Recently UK journal Photographies invited me to write an "image led" piece on the work for their forthcoming second issue. Here's the essay, which looks at how we interpret, and literally image, pattern and change in the environment, and the role of data in that process. The themes (data, materiality, aesthetics) and some of the examples will be familiar to regular visitors. New things include spatiotemporal imaging (and even photography) as data visualisation, weather vs climate, black cockatoos, a quick look at art using environmental data-sources, and an equally quick dig at Tufte's Wavefields. It's also the most autobiographical bit of writing I've done in years - make of that what you will.

A few related projects that I discovered in the course of things: Miska Knapek's 24 hour visualisations, Michael Surtees' 36 Days of New York Sky, William Gaver's Video Window (pdf) - thanks Karl for the link - and yesyesnono's Travelling Around images - beautiful radial time-slices at a smaller time scale.




My childhood home was near an air force base on the outskirts of Sydney, where the sky was host to a wonderful array of aircraft. Mostly big, droning transports; Caribou and Hercules, each with their signature profiles and engine notes. Jets and helicopters were rarer and more prized: Mackie trainers, F-111s, Iroquois, Sikorskys and Chinooks. Once, miraculously, a visiting Starlifter transport, an immense silver thing apparently suspended over the hobby farms and horse paddocks. Unasked-for, revelatory, literally out of the blue, the planes were also metonymic signs of a wider world, and an idealised high-tech future I could barely wait for. Living signs flew over us too; we loved to think that black cockatoos were harbingers of rain, and would count them to predict the number of wet days ahead (image: Beppie K). I discovered the UFO lore of the early 80s; in dreams I was visited by terrifying lights, and saw archaic aircraft disintegrating above the eucalypt gully behind our house.


I came to Canberra from Sydney in early 2001, and the sky changed, opening out into a brilliant dome bounded by hills. Soon after it changed again as the nostalgic motif of the gliding passenger jet was overlain with catastrophe. This was echoed by strange weather, a long drought. Safe in suburbia, I installed a water tank and began watching the sky more hopefully, tracking rain bands and storm cells on the weather bureau's website: running out to clear the downpipes, then back to the laptop, downloading the latest. Sky data, almost real-time, a new and better harbinger, and with more at stake this time - water in the tank, a four thousand litre buffer against the next dry stretch. Never far away, the question of when weather becomes climate; is this a "blip" or a trend, short term variability or long term change? Temperature and rainfall statistics become common currency, and every month brings new data, but the more we know the less certain we become; in fact the only consensus seems to suggest more uncertainty. Ocean temperature measurements feed supercomputer models whose simulations are distilled into enticing, oracular suggestions, indications, projections. We occupy an increasingly detailed graph of accumulated data, but remain trapped inevitably in the present, at its right hand edge.

Watching the clouds approaching and cross-checking the weather radar, it's impossible not to sense the gaps and disjunctions between the data - an authorised, centralised and objective account of what is - and the situation "on the ground." This patch of rain that should be on us now, and somehow is not. It seems to have eluded the radar's view, slipped between the pixels or time-steps, or vanished in the lag, the aporia of almost-real-time which is the time data itself takes: to gather, check, validate, compile, visualise, distribute. The weather stubbornly continues to occur in the present, and at full resolution. The rainfall figures always come (as any weather watcher will know) from elsewhere, a single, notionally representative monitoring point. We're always cheated, as a result; overstated or undermeasured. Rain carries such social charge, where I live, that locals call the radio station, reporting from their backyard rain gauges in pyjamas and gumboots. This is the only way of closing that gap, to measure the world locally and create data instead of just siphoning it down from the web. I make my own measurements, tapping on the side of the tank slowly, bottom to top, listening for the hollow ring of the air cavity, homing in on the water level: data sonification.


In contemporary networked culture we are constantly reminded of the scale, ubiquity and significance of data. Every search, message, document, image, social exchange is a data transaction. We seem to be couched in data; it is our new environment. We accept this much-heralded "information overload" with more or less equanimity, as our inboxes and hard drives steadily fill. It's not surprising that in recent years artists and designers working in this domain have begun to grapple with data as a material. As I've argued elsewhere this inevitably involves the construction of an idea of what data is, what it's for, and what it contains. This practice also confronts the pragmatic question of what to do with data, what to make from it and (if we accept the value of the term) a data aesthetics.

One of the dominant creative strategies in this field, and its main aesthetic trope, is multiplicity: displays in which the points and lines of simple graphs burgeon into clouds, fields or flows. The datasets, and their visual figures, reflect our overloaded data-environment. This aesthetics of scale has been theorised through the notion of the sublime, a figure historically associated with nature's beautiful and/or terrible expanses; once again data takes the place of environment (see for example Manovich 2002 (doc) and Jevbratt 2004 (13Mb pdf)).

The data sublime is aesthetically expedient, as well as culturally resonant. Sheer scale generates visual richness as well as revealing patterns within datasets; yet the data points we see here are meagre and unmysterious in themselves. Each is a small cluster of symbols and parameters generated through a (social, cultural) process of selection, filtering, quantification and categorisation, in order to grasp some specific slice of the world in a certain way. When data swarms and flows with apparently inherent dynamics, it's easy to forget how data is created, or even that it is created. This is especially true when the data source is the network itself; self-referentiality gives an impression of self-sufficiency, again a world in which data is given, rather than made.


Countering this tendency a number of works draw in data from the physical environment "outside", and direct our attention back towards a space that is more familiar and more uncomfortable than the digital realm. For example Andrea Polli's work brings data from large spatial and temporal scales into the realm of experience, often in close collaboration with scientists; her Atmospherics project (2004) renders meteorological data gathered from a severe storm as a complex spatial soundscape. Heat and the Heartbeat of the City (2004) sonifies temperature data for New York City, beginning with data gathered during the 1990s, and presenting projections for future decades based on climate change modeling. More recently Bonding Energy, by Douglas Repetto and LoVid (2007, above), gathers data from custom-made sculptural devices measuring solar energy levels, and displays changing levels from multiple measuring sites in an animated visualisation. These works use data reflectively, and show a commitment to the "outside" that is their ultimate data source. However they are also limited by the structure of their material, which measures the world through a single value — temperature or solar radiation level. This single point, as telling as it is, seems somehow overdetermined: too much what it is, too tightly bound to an existing set of meanings and stories.

Photographic imaging, by comparison, gathers large amounts of complex data from the environment: many millions of numerical values with a rich set of spatial interrelations. The notion that the camera reveals the otherwise invisible, as in the work of Muybridge for example, mirrors the aims of data visualisation; yet this also reveals an important difference in these two practices. The reduced data of measurements such as temperature go to great lengths to exclude the extraneous. On the other hand photography, if we regard it as a form of data visualisation, often seems to welcome the extraneous, to embrace incursions, unexpected interactions or extra layers. This is not to claim the photographic image has some kind of special relation to reality, or that it isn't just as selective, intentional, and conditional as a temperature measurement; it's more a slight opening out of the field of view. The photograph can operate something like a geological core sample, selective but inclusive, a piece of whatever happens to be within the frame.

In the emergent field of (what I will call) space-time imaging, artists exploit the digital photographic image to reconfigure representations of the world. This work has a pre-digital ancestry in slit-scan photography and cinematic effects, but with the digital image it has expanded and proliferated (see Levin). Artists have begun to approach the image as a two-dimensional data field; they treat time by extension as a third conceptual axis, forming a three dimensional volume. This abstract structure is literalised in projects such as Alvaro Cassinelli's Khronos Projector (2005), where we can "push" parts of the image back in time. While the experience of the work hinges on the fleshing out of a spatial metaphor, its operation can be understood as interactive data visualisation: a technique for selecting and presenting data points from the image series. Other work, such as that of Australian artist Daniel Crooks, can also be understood laterally, I would argue, as data visualisation or re-visualisation. Crooks works with digital video source material and explores the de- and re-composition of the image in ways that deform space and time, but also, like other data practices, reveal their subjects anew . In "time slice" work such as Train 6 (2004) Crooks samples small segments of the time/image stack, revealing their raw edges, rather than trying to smoothly reconstitute the image. The discourse around this work tends to emphasise its (broadly familiar) agenda: reconfiguring perception, breaking down conventions of representation, and so on (see for example Doropoulos). Like Dziga Vertov before him, Crooks' subject matter is deliberately everyday (public transport, urban spaces), drawing attention back to this reflexive project. Yet at its most poignant, Crooks' work also reveals real patterns of movement and change in the world that it samples. It re-visualises reality, and in doing so it demonstrates the richness of the photographic time-series as data set.


Watching the Sky is a deliberately simple-minded experiment. It uses the most basic techniques of slit-scan photography and related digital space-time work. Using a static digital camera tethered to a computer, I take images at three minute intervals; four hundred and eighty per day. The camera is in my office, pointing out the window with an unremarkable view of the neighbouring building, some trees, power lines, and the sky over west Belconnen. A simple script extracts a narrow vertical slice from each image, at the same location in the frame; then compiles those slices into a new image. In the rectangular visualisations the slices are tiled from left to right. In the radial visualisations slices are gradually rotated so that a twenty-four-hour period spans one complete revolution (the "seam" is at midnight).

Of course any number of other visualisation processes are possible. The digital space-time field illustrates many of the options, though this work often plays with the reconstitution of a transformed image, which was not my interest here. Slices are used as a simple way to compress days' worth of data into a single visual field, while preserving as much as possible the spatial relations within each frame. They also make for visualisations with a simple logic, readable as high density graphs.

In a strange inversion of this project, Edward Tufte, prominent theorist of information visualisation and design, recently called for a new generation of information graphics - "wavefields" - that match the data rate of high-definition video, showing "high-resolution, complex, multiple, animated statistical data-flows." Yet the video exemplars that Tufte uses to make this proposal are not "statistical data flows" but abstract shots from the physical environment: rippling reflections on water and undulating meadows. It's striking that Tufte turns to these environmental sources of visual pattern to mock up a more "intense" genre of abstract, statistical visualisation. Among other things, Watching the Sky attempts to demonstrate that this kind of informational density (and aesthetic intensity) is already immanent (it's just out the window).

I'm influenced here by the work of Lisa Jevbratt, an artist whose data visualisations have focused on the digital networks, but whose approach works against any simple notion of information. Here too density is increased to the point of saturation: with a large and multilayered dataset, Jevbratt's 1:1 (1999/2002) visualises the attributes of some 180,000 internet (IP) addresses sampled by the artist. The resulting images are startling and completely abstract, but not at all unstructured. Jevbratt describes the visualisations as "abstract reals", and "objects for interpretation, not interpretations." Instead of demonstrating the already known, or the answer to a preconceived question (information), Jevbratt's data works provoke, and perhaps answer, new questions; in the artist's words "hints, suggestions, and openings."


Although the data source in Watching the Sky is as tangible and unmysterious as possible, surprising hints and suggestions continue to appear. In one of the earliest sketches I found small but distinct variations in the "horizon" over the course of a day, and recurring on successive days. I eventually realised this was caused by the afternoon breeze, shifting foliage by a few pixels within the frame. The dataset here is a trace of a complex material field that in a sense visualises its own internal structure: the passage of a shadow across the ground appears as a recurring pattern, an enfolded or multiplexed representation of another set of material interactions. As a data source, the photographic image also cuts easily across categories and domains. In the rectangular visualisations presented here stripes of colour are visible towards the bottom of the frame. These are caused by cars, parked illegally under the trees; they form another ad-hoc graph that reflects human (cultural, institutional) calendars and cycles, though again they are intermingled with other scales and structures.

Time, and the perception of change, are central here. Like Jevbratt my hope is that these visualisations will be platforms for interpretation that can somehow augment our local, subjective, everyday practice of reading the environment. There's a yawning gap in our culture at the moment, between this experiential scale, and the long, slow-motion catastrophe we seem to be in. Weather watchers comment on the isobars, track the low pressure systems as they pass, speculate on ocean surface temperatures and the Southern Oscillation; like the black cockatoos each data point is an ambiguous sign that refers to a wider material system. This project is a straightforward response that proposes another way to image, and think, pattern and change in the environment.

This is a preprint of an article submitted for consideration in Photographies © 2008 Taylor and Francis; Photographies is available online here.

Continuing to think through Gumbrecht's theories of presence and aesthetic experience, I want to focus briefly on his comments on technology, and especially media technologies, in relation to presence. Gumbrecht is understandably ambivalent: "I am trying to neither condemn nor give a mysterious aura to our media environment. It has alienated us from the things of the world and their present - but at the same time, it has the potential for bringing back some of the things of the world to us." [140] Gumbrecht links this alienation with a "Cartesian" desire for omnipresence - the decoupling of experience from the body. But he also suggests that "the more we approach the fulfillment of our dreams of omnipresence ... the greater the possibility becomes of reigniting the desire that attracts us to the things of the world and wraps us into their space" [139]. So the Cartesian tendencies of communications media drive us back towards a consciousness of, and a desire for "presence." This reaction is clear in new media art (and theory), which seems increasingly focused on embodied experience despite, or because of, its (critical) immersion in technology.

Elsewhere in Gumbrecht's writing technology, and even media art, crop up again. In a recent paper on "Aesthetic Experience in Everyday Worlds" Gumbrecht considers how presence-type experiences can manifest outside the stale, exhausted realms of Art, and perhaps bring about a "re-enchantment of the world."

It might be that, at the intersection between some possibilities offered by contemporary technology with that longing for re-enchantment ... we have a chance of discovering the potential for a much more dispersed and decentralized map of aesthetic pleasures, and of a much less "autonomous," stale and heavy-handed style and gesture of Art. ...

Should such a possibility exist indeed, much will depend on the capability of artists and intellectuals to avoid its transformation into a "program." For I am not talking of the complicated merits of new art forms like "video art" or "digital installations" here but ... of straightforward pleasures like driving a high-powered car, riding on a speed train, writing with an old fountain pen or, for some of us at least, running a new software program on the computer - pleasures that do certainly not require the institutional status of aesthetic autonomy." [316]

Following Gumbrecht's candid approach, I'll be autobiographical for a minute. I've been trying recently to frame what it is that unites all the practices I'm interested in (and that this blog has been covering): generative art, glitchy / improvised / realtime sound, music and audiovisuals, "fused" or "synaesthetic" AV, data visualisation and sonification, live coding, software practices, systems art. I've been trying to use "inframedia" as a point of connection - this idea of art that refers to, or rather manifests or makes present its own underlying systems. Presence, or at least what Gumbrecht calls "presence effects", might be a more powerful and elegant way to express the same connection.


This work seems to be seeking out those moments or sensations of intense presence that Gumbrecht describes as aesthetic experience. This is no surprise - if Gumbrecht is right then all art pursues those moments. What unites all these practices is a sense of making-themselves-present that we can contrast, again following Gumbrecht, with "meaning culture" uses of the same systems. To pick a more or less arbitrary example, consider Carsten Nicolai's Telefunken (above - image from here). In its released form, the work was an audio CD carrying a signal designed to generate both video and audio; plugging the Telefunken CD into your TV set makes the TV/CD media system, and importantly the signal, present. Flip to broadcast television and you're back in "meaning culture." The point of intensity that Telefunken can induce is precisely a sense of presence, of a circuit of (electronic / audio / visual) materials being themselves. Not (at least not wholly) a sense of the work as an artwork, a manifestation of artistic will, a general or specific commentary on media or art, a self-conscious performance of media-hacking. All those elements are latent in the work, but on the "meaning" side of this binary. In a sense they follow on from that moment of intense presence that, in this work and others like it, seems to be primary. Like Gumbrecht I'm not outlawing interpretation (what critic or theorist would?); instead there's an "oscillation" between presence and meaning. The key is that this theory asserts presence as an autonomous or incompatible mode of experience. Presence can be interpreted, but not interpreted away.


How does data art fit with this schema? There are some striking conjunctions around modes of knowledge. One characteristic of Gumbrecht's "presence culture" is that "legitimate knowledge is typically revealed knowledge. It is knowledge revealed by (the) god(s) or by difference varieties of what one might describe as 'events of self-unconcealment of the world.'" And this is an unconventional form of knowledge: "substance that appears, that presents itself to us (even with its inherent meaning), without requiring interpretation as its transformation into meaning." [81] We can find a similar sense of revelation in artists' discourses around data art; a sense of the revelation of what is inherent in the data; and a transcoding between data-substance and sensory material. Lisa Jevbratt described her data images as "abstract realism" and "objects for interpretation, not interpretations" (the image above is from 1:1). Data art seeks out "events of self-unconcealment of data" - data as materially present. Data artists typically defer or avoid attributing meaning to the data material (though as I've also argued, meaning always leaks in); once again we find an oscillation between presence and meaning, but an emphasis or movement towards the presence side of the binary. We could align, more or less, presence and meaning binary with the data/information distinction I've used recently to critique this practice.


What about generative art? My hunch is that presence is relevant here too, and it has something to do with the generative process; it's that process, and the model or system it entails, that presents itself in generative art. In Jonathan McCabe's Butterfly Origami works (above) we see a complex visualisation of a generative process (an accumulating series of spatial folds and transformations). If there's an aesthetic experience - a moment of intensity - here, perhaps it is some kind of felt revelation of that process. Again we can pursue the work's ramifications on the meaning side, at both the image and system level; but these seem secondary to me. There's much more to do in thinking this through; are there any obvious counterexamples, cases where generative art is not a materialisation or making-present of its own system?

One of the strong points of PerthDAC was its overlap with BEAP, Perth's premiere media arts festival; even better, the conference built in gallery visits to several of the BEAP shows. I'll blog the conference soon - meantime see for example Axel Bruns' comprehensive blogumentation. For now here are some thoughts on two of my favourite works from BEAP, both of which use abstract digital forms to create profoundly embodied experiences.


In Ulf Langheinrich's Waveform B, video projection and strobe lights play over a long, pool-like screen on the floor of the installation space. Entering the darkened central space of the building, the screen flashes and vibrates under ultraviolet strobes, seeming initially to come loose from the floor, hover and drift. The strobe banks mark out audiovisual intervals of time, but always accelerating or slowing, coming together, intensifying or dissipating: temporal waves meet, reinforce and neutralise each other. When these waves are most intense the work's visual field becomes overwhelming; bursts of ultraviolet seem to outpace vision, inducing refractions, afterimages, phenomenal artefacts that drive perception inwards. In calmer moments video-projected noise textures blend with the strobes, and again occupy a perceptual threshhold where time and space interfold; the noise seems to eddy and flow; differentiations in space rise out of this horizontal field and quickly sink back into it. The ripples are derived from video of Ghanaian ocean waves - there's a trace or imprint of fluid dynamics here; the overlay of oceanic ripples and video static recalls Michel Serres' Genesis, where he figures noise itself as a kind of material and informational sea.

Strangely, Hannah Mathews' catalog statement describes the work as "a temple to technology, enabling audiences to meditate upon the inherent stillness of a contemplative digital void." Slightly better than another PICA account - "a multi-level, immersive audiovisual experience of the colour blue." Happily neither description does the work any kind of justice. Waveform B evokes phenomenality; material, sensual experience; though unlike some other works with this aim, Langheinrich eschews (conventional) pleasure in favour of overload, disorientation and the edges of perceptual experience. Augmented with strobes the ubiquitous video projector is stripped back to its technical core, a kind of hyper-articulated source of visual energy, rather than a cinematic window on the wall. A 2005 interview fleshes out some of Langheinrich's background; I was struck especially by his mention of music as an aesthetic model. On that thread, the soundtrack at the PICA installation created an effective atmosphere, but lacked impact - maybe the sub had been turned down?


In George Khut's Cardiomorphologies v.2 participants are gently rigged with breathing and pulse sensors that drive an abstract visualisation. Overlayed concentric rings and discs grow and shrink in patterns that suggest both modernist geometric abstraction and mystical diagrams or mandalas. Using the system the visualisation takes on another inflection, as a kind of avatar, a (data) projection of the self imagined through the language of meditative practice as a point of energy. Biofeedback - at the core of Khut's project - occurs as bodily process drives image which in turn inflects mind and body. I enjoyed that state, but it's not a guaranteed ticket to nirvana; I saw others getting quite uncomfortable as their heightened awareness of breath led into anxiety.

Khut's approach is an interesting combination of techno-pragmatism and an ethical commitment to, and knowledge of, bodily subjectivity. Engaging visitors to the work he's very open about the mechanics of sensors, data gathering, analysis and interpretation; if you're interested he can explain in detail the theoretical correlations between spectral analysis of heartrate fluctuation frequency and the parasympathetic/sympathetic nervous system balance. Khut makes it clear this isn't some mystical strain of data-mapping "magic," but a concrete, physio-psychological process. In fact the conversations around the work are part of the process, drawing out participants' experiences and sensations and informing the ongoing development of the system. Khut's work shows how data practice can engage intelligently with, and reflect on, the extraction or creation of datasets as well as their aesthetic and affective manifestations.

Next week I'm off to Perth for DAC, where I'll be presenting a paper focusing on data art. It looks at a good handful of works from the last few years, including The Dumpster by Golan Levin with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg, We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar, Alex Dragulescu's spam visualisations, Lisa Jevbratt's 1:1 and Infome Imager Lite, Brad Borevitz's State of the Union and some of Jason Salavon's abstraction and amalgamation works.

The paper develops the questions that I posted here a while ago, focusing on how artists construct a notion of data while they use it as a creative material. It especially considers the distinction between data and information, arguing that data art often works to defer, abstract or undermine information - in the sense of a formed or contextualised message - and instead offers us a more open or underdetermined experience of the data as abstract pattern and relation. The problem here is that we can't have unmediated access to the abstract data - it's always mapped to something, structured in ways extraneous to the dataset. And data itself is always extracted, made or constructed, not some kind of autonomous digital object.

The case studies are clumped around four data-figures: indexical data - data as a sign of something real - as in The Dumpster and We Feel Fine; abject data - data as empty and malleable, as in Dragulescu's work; Lisa Jevbratt's data material or Infome; and data as anti-content or "artist's squint" in Salavon's work and Borevitz's State of the Union.

Anyhow, here's the full paper (3.3Mb pdf). Feedback very welcome, of course.

(update: the pdf file was corrupt, sorry - fixed now)

The data from the 2006 Australian census has just been released. In the last day or two the media have run the usual kind of headline stories - in which specific bits of data or comparions are extracted, spun and narrativised; nationally, there's been some focus on increasing debt (and income); locally Canberrans have been portrayed as richer, more wired and more generous with their time than everyone else. This process of top-down public storytelling dominates our understanding of this kind of data - but perhaps that will change, because now the whole dataset is available online, for free. It's buried a few steps in, and yes it's in a proprietary (Excel) format, but it's all there for the munging.

I started browsing some data from my suburb, and focused on numbers of kids per mother per age group. It's coarse-grained data but evocative - birth rates suggest a lot about a society. Comparisons suburb by suburb also hint at distinct demographic patterns. I put together a quick visualisation, a stacked area graph (inspired in part by Lee Byron's beautiful last.fm vis). Another reference was the Japanese tradition of Koinobori, the carp pennants that celebrate Boy's (now Children's) Day. So, here are some statistical pennants - suburban emblems that encode demographic data. Maybe we could fly them at the shops, or individuals could annotate them by marking their own place in the local profile. It's fun to play amateur demographer (read on) but the point here is really proof of concept; if I can do this, so can lots and lots of others, and that's interesting in itself.


Each form shows the number of children per woman; the wide end is zero, the narrow end is six or more. So in all the pennants the initial dip shows the difference between the number of women without children, and women with one child; then more women with two kids, fewer with three and so on. The thicker tail visible in the second pennant shows a larger number of women with lots of kids. The bands in each pennant show age groups, with youngest at the top. Most young women have no kids - not a great surprise - but the forms also show older women with larger families, and the relative distribution of children by mother's age group, and how this varies with suburb. The bottom-most pennant comes from an old, wealthy suburb: lots of older women with two and three kids. Pennant two is from a semi-rural town, with a more even distribution of children through the age bands; pennant three is from a new suburb, with wide bands of small, relatively young families. Colours are arbitrary, for the moment.

For more demographic data art see also Jason Salavon's American Varietal project, commissioned by the US Census Bureau.

Lisa Jevbratt has been doing data art for some time now. Her 1:1 (1999) was one of the first data-vis works to gain critical attention in new media art circles. I re-read some of Jevbratt's writing recently, and the artist pointed me to this 2005 paper, which in part sets out the concept of the Infome. Jevbratt seems to be changing direction - towards bio/eco practices - but her work remains significant, especially while data is the new code/black/whatever, for the Processing generation. The Infome idea is particularly interesting, because it creates a distinctive sense of just what data is.

Jevbratt's Infome is a kind of data cosmology - the Infome is an "all-encompassing network environment/organism that consists of all computers and code." Once you get past the biological analogy, the Infome offers a way to treat data as a kind of material that is concrete and self-sufficient, but also shaped by the (social, political, technological) forces outside it. Data is indexical, but not in the empirical sense of measurement or simple correspondence. Instead Jevbratt uses another material (geological) analogy; the Infome is a kind of landscape in which external forces and structures are overlayed and condensed. Another nice twist is that visualisation becomes recursive: "Images can now simultaneously be reality, since they are part of the Infome, and an imprint of that reality, as if the image produced by a potato stamp were also a potato."

Jevbratt's images of the Infome in 1:1 and Infome Imager Lite aspire to this kind of material directness, making a "slice" or "imprint" of the data. She describes the images as "real, objects for interpretation, not interpretations." This desire to present the data "in itself" closely resembles the "pure data" aesthetics of the audiovisual databenders I mentioned in "Hearing Pure Data" (2004). We can make the same critiques of Jevbratt's work - that we can't see the data in itself, only its specific mapping. Jevbratt does take great care to explain the mappings used, and best of all in IIL she encourages the user to experiment with changing mappings and datasets - an artistic precursor of the public data literacy now mentioned in relation to social data-vis services Swivel and ManyEyes. The critique still stands though; it's clearest in the way Jevbratt wraps all these visualisations around the rectangular picture plane - a structure that has no inherent relation to the data, but a significant relation to the art-world context that these works function in.

For Jevbratt these data-impressions allow us to "use our vision to think" - information and pattern arise from a perceptual process, rather than a computational analysis. Like much other data art, Jevbratt resists providing information, in the sense of meaning or message; instead she offers a substrate for information, a field of potential meaning. She writes of seeking "something unexpected," "hints, suggestions, and openings" that lead us into the Infome itself, its immanent, collective dynamics, even its emergent, distributed agency. It's a kind of data mysticism, but also an attempt to sense the real but otherwise imperceptable shapes of digital culture.

Recently read this paper, by writer and online cult studs pioneer Alan Liu, which raises lots of ideas and yet more questions around data aesthetics and practices. It's a few years old, but with a few exceptions remains quite relevant. What's more it's a great read, one of the wittiest and most enjoyable things I've seen in a long while.

Approaching from writing and textuality, Liu tackles the XMLification of everything, the Taylorist dogma of the separation of content from presentation (hello, Blogger) and the subsequent waning of "cool" web design: "non-standard, proprietary, hand-coded, and other clearly infidel (or ... artisanal) practices of embodying content inextricably in presentation." Instead, Liu sees the web becoming a modular, minimalist set of containers for what he calls "data pours" that "throw transcendental information onto the page from database or XML sources reposed far in the background." Literature-wise, Liu regards these data-driven incursions as "blind spots" for both readers and writers, where authorship surrenders to parameterisation or a database query.

Liu gathers a set of artworks around the concept of the data sublime (later tackled by Manovich and Warren Sack, among others) and the question of "what can still be cool" in the post-industrial, database age. Through Kittler, he recalls the Modernist literary interest in the noise in the channel - "like tuning your radio to a Pynchonesque channel of revelation indistinguishable from utter static" -and points out that contemporary data aesthetics seem interested in the same immanent revelation, but here the sources of that data-plenitude are highly rational and structured. Data practices s/mash them up, as if in attempt to feel their inner consistency; Liu identifies this drive with the "ethos of the unknown" - a search for "an experience of the structurally unknowable."

Liu's ideas map onto current data art well enough, though rather than data pours threatening authorship, a new group of authors deploys parameterisation, mapping, munging and filtering as its main techniques. The "mother tongue" now, the source of plenitude, seems also to be increasingly social, rather than natural or linguistic (eg Linkology, The Dumpster, Listening Post). And pulling against the sublime and the ethos of the unknown is its empirical opposite, the seeking of pattern and information. The surface between these seems to be the place to be; as in the beautiful Neuromancer quote in Liu's paper, it's a liminal state where forms emerge and disintegrate. Familiar territory for the arts, as Liu points out.

A few more thoughts and questions following on from the previous post, and responses to it. If data art isn't necessarily concerned with the (apparent) meaning of its datasets, or their empirical basis, then what is it concerned with? Perhaps one answer has something to do with performance. Whatever else it does, this work performs a process that is meaningful in itself. Whatever else it says, it also says, "watch what I do with this data." It displays a data literacy, an ability to acquire, munge, filter, process, map and render. Since it's primarily operating as art, rather than functional visualisation / sonification, it also demonstrates a process of translating or mediating between those domains. This isn't a criticism (necessarily), just trying to think through a few basics, and taking on those points from toxi and infosthetics re. the tension between art and visualisation here. If data art is partly self-referential performance, then what kind of cultural values exist / are constructed around that? Manovich refers to "data-subjectivity" - are data artists exploring / peforming this "super-modern" state of being?


I'm sure there's a connection here somewhere with literal acts of data-performance. I saw some live coding performances at the Medi(t)ations conference in Adelaide (blogged earlier). Brisbane duo aa-cell(Andrew Sorensen and Andrew Brown) played a great set - two laptops, both running Sorensen's own Impromptu environment, with screens projected to show the accumulating code. Here too there was a kind of mediation between computational and cultural domains - a performance of (largely obscure) code structures that generated a sonic structure dense with musical references. It was partly the pulse of a synth kick drum (hand coded, of course) but I came away thinking of Kraftwerk - laptop live coding as the new "man machine."

Live coding has a transparency that a lot of data art lacks - the code structure is gradually constructed, giving an (expert) observer some chance of following the formal, generative structure. Most data art conceals its mapping and munging, offering only an artefact and a promise that yes, this is "the data." Live coding's transparency is itself pretty opaque, though. At least one audience member at the Adelaide performance had no idea that the displayed text bore any relation to the sound. Live coding looks like great fun for the performers (like most improv), but what about the audience? Is data-subjectivity a prerequisite?

I'm working up a paper on data aesthetics and creative practice, looking especially at visualisation (a kind of companion to "Hearing Pure Data," a paper written a while ago focusing on sonification / audification). At this stage all I have is a collection of questions and semi-formed hunches - so make of it what you will, etc.

• Are we talking about data or information?Lev Manovich uses the term "info-aesthetics" and connects these practices to the notion of an "information society". What if we move back a step, and look at the relationship between data and information? Data is the raw material, the datum or measurements: information is the message or meaning constructed using those datum. Both terms get used (more or less interchangeably) around artworks doing visualisation, but I think we should maintain the distinction. Is this work concerned with rendering information - a known, formed message? On the surface at least it seems to be more interested in visual interfaces to data, downplaying or leaving open the interpretation of that data - its transformation into information.


• As I argued in "Hearing Pure Data," presenting the data "in itself" is an impossible ideal; it is inevitably shaped, interpreted, formed, framed, etc., in any manifestation; in which case how does visual data art negotiate its own construction of information from the datasets it works with? Does it pass off its own interpretation and framing as "raw data"?


• What about the constitution of the data itself? Data art seems to take a pragmatic and concrete approach - "the data is the data" - but any meaning constructed from that data must be inflected by the way the data itself was formed or gathered. This is stating the obvious to anyone working in the empirical sciences... how do data artists respond? In the wake of the AOL reSearch dataset affair, the issue of constructing information from data comes into sharp focus. It will be interesting to see how artists use this dataset (which as Marius Watz recently observed, they no doubt will). The ethics of data art?


• Data art treats its datasets as generative resources: sources of rich structure, pattern and complexity. It seems that often the appreciation of these formal qualities of the datasets (or their visualisations) exists in tension with the content or referentiality of the data. There's a continuum: TheyRule leans towards referentiality and meaning; Ben Fry's Valence is more concerned with pattern (it's an exploration of a visualisation technique after all); The Dumpster sits somewhere in the middle.


• Toxi blogged a while ago on the issue of access to quality datasets for creative visualisation. As the comments on his post show, this begs a kind of cart/horse question. Tom Carden writes: "once you've got the info vis bug, you feel like a guy with a big shiny hammer, but nobody will give you a nail." This brings us back to the same question: is this work about data as an indexical link to the world, or data as a generative device? Or both?


• On a related point, there's a clear crossover between generative and data-driven art; the artists are often one and the same; the same tools are used. How can we think about the relationship between these practices? They seem to be complementary approaches to similar goals (visual and aesthetic complexity, the joy of the unexpected, etc): one builds a generative system from scratch, the other latches onto the most complex existing generative system (the world) and visualises that.