Output details

Landscapes of feeling, arenas of action: information visualisation as art practice

This paper arose from an AHRC-funded project in 2006 looking at how artists were employing environmental data in installation works. Research case studies comprised the production of an artwork that explored issues of knowledge in climate change, and an exhibition ‘The Information’, curated by Corby, which included prominent practitioners Lucy Kimbell, Christian Nold, Abigail Reynolds, Mark Amerika (the University of Westminster). Additional talks held between 2006-07 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (Sites and Para-Sites) and The Science Museum (Cybersalon) also informed research. The paper developed themes from case studies and had a dual purpose. Firstly, to situate emerging data practice by contemporary artists within a wider context and secondly, to synthesise theories from digital arts and computer science to confront epistemic issues of fidelity in the visualisation of information. While some theorists have sought to place this work within wider art historical traditions such as Modernism (Manovich) or Visual Culture (Elkins), at the time of writing, little extended research had attempted to account for emergent art practices in this manner. The paper developed arguments for an expanded use and understanding of data visualisation in both the arts and sciences, namely that: (i) its primary analytical function can be overridden and otherwise relocated to generate images productive of critical and aesthetic knowledge and affective experience; (ii) visualisation can be connected to existing traditions in the visual arts (landscape, modernist conceptual, and participatory arts); (iii) participatory processes originating in visual arts practices can provide models for scientists to engage publics in different ways. The paper led to further AHRC-funded research projects in 2009 and 2010, underpinning the emergence of new research concerned with how artists situate the use of data as a social, environmental and political medium that has directly informed the practice outlined in Outputs 1 and 2.