01-mitl22.pages.4.indd WestminsterResearch http://www.wmin.ac.uk/westminsterresearch Landscapes of feeling arenas of action: information visualisation as art practice. Tom Corby School of Media, Arts and Design This is a copy of an article first published in Leonardo: Art Science and Technology, 41 (5). pp. 460-467, October 2008. It is available online in Leonardo, at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/leon.2008.41.5.460 © 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Users are permitted to download and/or print one copy for non-commercial private study or research. Further distribution and any use of material from within this archive for profit-making enterprises or for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch. (http://www.wmin.ac.uk/westminsterresearch). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail wattsn@wmin.ac.uk. 451 Color Plate E Abigail Reynolds, Mount Fear East London, sculptural installation of police crime statistics, 2003. (© Abigail Reynolds) See General Article by Tom Corby. Tom Corby (artist, educator), Flat 1, 63 Wells Way, London SE5 7GB, United Kingdom. E-mail: . G E N E R A L A R T I C L E Landscapes of Feeling, Arenas of Action: Information Visualization as Art Practice Tom Corby This article identifi es experimental practices in information visualization (IV) that are situated in the digital and fi ne arts and occur outside of normative science contexts. By referring to my art practice, my curatorial projects and my ideas from the sciences, art history and theory, I set out a num- ber of arguments toward an appreciation of visualization as a form of image-making able to function and be applied to a wider range of topics than is cur- rently the case. I explore how sci- entifi c and visual arts domains may inform and learn from each other. This leads toward new understand- ings of the role and value of images produced using IV by showing how its processes can extend contempo- rary understandings of the image in the visual arts. The discussion shows that images are a vehicle capable of enabling comprehension of mate- rial realities. Equally, by referring to specifi c artworks, I demonstrate that the analytical function of IV can be overridden to produce types of images capable of producing critical, aesthetic and affective experience [1]. A B S T R A C T Discussing his recent art- works alongside those by Abigail Reynolds, Lucy Kimbell and Christian Nold, the author examines emerging phenomena in the digital and wider fi ne arts whereby information visualiza- tion practices are approached as creative media. By laying bare points of convergence and divergence between artistic and scientifi c approaches, the article develops a number of arguments that show how the pictures produced by infor- mation visualization may be reframed within wider aesthetic and critical frameworks. Thus the author explores how models of image production derived from processes of scientifi c inquiry expand possibilities for the visual arts to develop new types of hybrid images that consist of data grounded both in material realities and in symbolic and aesthetic elements. Fig. 1. Gavin Baily and Tom Corby, Cyclone.soc, 2006. (© Tom Corby and Gavin Baily. Photo © John Marshall.) Immersive installation visualizing newsgroup postings as weather formations. Article Frontispiece. Lucy Kimbell and Andrew Barry, Pindices project, website component, 2005. (© Lucy Kimbell and Andrew Barry) The front page of the website provided an “at a glance” view of the types and frequency of activities that individual participants were engaged in. ©2008 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 41, No. 5, pp. 460–467, 2008 461 462 Corby, Landscapes of Feeling bedded in the wider communities of users and creators than is the norm in science. Feeling Data The process of visualization involves translation of data into visual, symbolic form or pictures. The oft-quoted phrase, “The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures” [11], suggests that, as an instrumental practice, it is possible to separate the results of visualization from the pictorial artifacts that produce them: i.e. visualizations are valued according to their ability to effi ciently enable ac- cess to literal concentrates of data with minimal interference from aesthetic “noise” that might cloud interpretation. However, encounters with images of any kind involve interpretive and subjective responses on behalf of the viewer. These are infl uenced by personal experience, education, knowledge of the subject in hand, wider histories and social and cultural contexts [12]. If an image is worth a thousand words, the meaning within an image is necessarily fl uid and resists assimilation to singular interpreta- tion—which is as true for IV as for other disciplines. Epistemological issues of ob- jectivity—the truthfulness of the image and its interpretation—have long been debated in IV; its veridical function as a clear window onto the phenomena studied is compromised by the layers of mediation through which it travels. While Jack van Wijk [13] argued that the value of IV as a practice within scientifi c process is not questioned, data is not an asocial phenomenon untouched by hu- man hands, but is processed according to specifi c data parameters, hardware, chosen algorithms as well as the fi nal visual output or pictorial metaphor em- ployed to represent it—producing what Donna Cox has argued is a “culturally contingent” form grounded in wider vi- sual cultures and histories of interpreta- tion [14]. James Elkins has persuasively argued that scientifi c processes produce pictorial forms with both “propositional” and “nonpropositonal” content. What he means by this is that they contain informational components that clearly describe data and can be analyzed to propose or illuminate theories in a cogni- tive sense and also aesthetic constituents more akin to pictures in the fi ne arts that produce different effects. These aesthetic elements, he suggests, have the potential to be more prominent, enabling images concerned with data analysis to “mean more freely,” i.e. to produce more ex- pressively nuanced images that override explanatory interface between science and the public, media and policy mak- ers [6]. Despite this cultural penetration, un- til recently the fi ne arts have rarely used IV as a vehicle for creative activity. There are some notable exceptions to this rule, including Ad Reinhardt’s satirical pic- tures of the American art scene [7] and Mark Lombardi’s complex drawings of political and fi nancial interdependen- cies [8]; but the visual representation of data in the visual arts has traditionally been a prerogative of graphic artists, who in the contemporary context work in what Donna Cox has characterized as “renaissance teams”—that is, cross-disci- plinary groupings of artists and scientists who jointly contribute their expertise in order to solve the problems of pictur- ing and communicating specifi c bodies of scientifi c knowledge [9]. This work, while important, is not the remit of this article, as it generally adheres to an in- stitutional focus that is predominantly, if not exclusively, framed by scientifi c rather than broader critical and aesthetic discourses. Recently, however, the creative land- scape has changed: an increasing num- ber of independent artists have begun to explore the aesthetic and critical poten- tials of IV, as evidenced by the growing numbers of projects and online initiatives [10]. Despite this, little has been written that seeks either to understand how this emerging work relates to scientifi c visu- alization or to develop a broader cultural analysis of what is being produced by these practices. These and other issues were used as a platform for the exhibition The Infor- mation, which I co-curated with Michael Maziere at the University of Westminster’s art gallery in November 2005. Taking the form of screen projection, sculpture, in- stallation and workshops, the exhibition sought to map how artists were assimi- lating insights and processes from the sciences in relation to aesthetic, critical and conceptual knowledge in the visual arts. It developed three overlapping ar- guments: • IV is capable of functioning as a sen- sual and critical art medium able to handle complex affective and emo- tive subject matter • The visual arts can learn from scien- tifi c IV insofar as it offers them an ef- fective means of producing new types of images that are hybrids of data grounded in material realities and symbolic and aesthetic elements • Forms of IV that are possible (and perhaps necessary) are directly em- Background: Visualization and Cultural Production Before proceeding, I should perhaps clarify what I mean by information visu- alization and review how it is presented to and interfaces with wider public and visual cultures. Conventionally, the term refers to the application of computer graphics to data derived from external objects in order to generate visually un- derstandable pictures of phenomena. It is generally considered to have originated in the mid to late 1980s [2] as an attempt to manage contemporary increases in the quantity and complexity of informa- tion. This practice, as Edward Tufte has pointed out elsewhere [3], is but the lat- est manifestation of the “cognitive arts,” which historically have included maps, scientifi c diagrams, MRI scans, mathe- matical projections, charts and schemat- ics, among many other visual expressions of data. Computer-based IV is differenti- ated from these historical precedents by its ability to represent data interactively in multidimensional, navigable form, thus making it a particularly effective tool for handling large data sets and model- ing differing views and perceptions of the phenomena studied. By translating data into pictures, with IV we aim to capitalize on humans’ natural ability to spot patterns and relationships in visual fi elds (cognition). This enables an intuitive identifi cation of structures, which would not be available if presented in purely numeric form. In its role as part of the scientifi c discovery process, IV is routinely employed as an aid to inspire hypotheses and a mechanism to devise further questions and forms of data. Other prefi xes such as “scientifi c” and “data” are also employed to refer specifi - cally to the representation of naturally oc- curring objects and processes, such as the climate and the human body, and in the visualization of data, i.e. non-physically occurring abstract phenomena, such as stock market behavior and Internet traf- fi c. For the sake of consistency, I will con- tinue to use the term IV as a convenient catch-all label capable of encompassing all these approaches [4]. Outside of their immediate investi- gative function, visualizations play an important public role as a communica- tion medium and are regularly used by architects [5], employed in documentary and weather broadcasts, and utilized in venues that promote scientifi c ideas as spectacle, such as IMAX cinemas. Vi- sualization then has been established as a broad cultural form that acts as an Corby, Landscapes of Feeling 463 gail Reynolds’s project, Mount Fear East London (Color Plate E); however, un- like Cyclone.soc, Reynold’s project does not rework an existing visualization, but instead creates one from scratch using police statistics of violent crimes that have occurred over a year-long period in east London. The statistics were initially plotted in a 3D modeling program that extruded the data and then mapped it to the specifi c geographical location per- taining to the event. From this, Reynolds developed a sculpture made up of layers of cardboard whose resultant form dra- matizes the data by transforming it into a landscape of sheer mountains and plunging gorges, with peaks and valleys signifying high and low levels of violent incident. Mount Fear could feasibly be used as an analytical tool to determine where more police resources or social programs are needed in London, but its material pres- ence suggests a more nuanced range of cultural meanings. The sculpture is large (5.4 × 4.25 m, with a height of 1.47 m), which allows the audience to walk around and peer into its undulating features. Developing an experience of Cyclone.soc uses an edited concentrate of data from different storms derived from publicly available satellite forecast- ing for the eastern coast of the United States during the autumn of 2005. This information was then re-worked as vector animations traced from the original iso- bar projections using Adobe Illustrator and given depth, dimension and inter- activity by being re-programmed using the open GL platform. In this way, the work “shadows” scientifi c practice, be- cause it does not image a specifi c event, but rather constructs a fi ctive space that is an amalgam of different data. Thus, a mutant or hybrid image is produced that threads information derived from social interactions into a pre-existing meteorological topology. In resituating newsgroup postings as weather phenom- ena, the project frees pictorial elements to act as metonyms for different types of cultural and ideological tension enabled and produced through technological do- mains. It also develops a suggestive link between extreme belief systems and their potential wider impacts on the material world. A similar approach is evident in Abi- the propositional function of the scien- tifi c image [15]. The fi rst two artworks I discuss in this article, Cyclone.soc (2005–2006) (which I produced in collaboration with Gavin Baily) and Mount Fear East London (2003) by Abigail Reynolds, take this potential as a starting point to explore how IV has the potential to generate sensual and affec- tive experiences for audiences through the use of intricate formal assemblages of information, space, material and im- age [16]. Intense conviction is the subject mat- ter of Cyclone.soc (Fig. 1), an immersive interactive environment that combines Internet debates between extremist re- ligious and political groups with severe weather conditions. Streamed live, dif- ferent newsgroup postings are fi tted to the atmospheric topologies of a num- ber of cyclonic weather fronts of differ- ing strengths, giving the overall effect of a conversational churn and eddy of argument and counter-argument. Post- ings can then be read by either walk- ing around the space or using controls to maneuver to specifi c formations and conversations. Fig 2. Abigail Reynolds, acrylic and wax pencil study on card, 600 × 840 mm, 2002. (© Abigail Reynolds) 464 Corby, Landscapes of Feeling forms of visual epistemology capable of reducing complex social relations to tan- gible structures. Thus we might argue that (even inadvertently and unconsciously) the scientifi c image is subject to histori- cal forms of pictorial production rooted in experiments in wider visual and fi ne art cultures, while, as evidenced by the work discussed here, IV is simultaneously cycling back into visual culture the new pictorial forms produced by emerging technologies. Visualizations for the People Visualizations are used to inform govern- mental policy in areas as diverse as na- tional defense, climate change, economic performance, education, industry and law [18] and thus impinge on our lives at the level of social, economic and envi- ronmental planning. Access to tools that generate information privileges its users (“information is power”), retrenches sys- tems of fi xed privilege and builds divides between information “haves” and “have knowledge. It is an aesthetically situated knowledge that arises when audiences encounter and negotiate complex inter- changes of data, feeling and sensation. Both artworks also make historical connections to older art traditions and therefore locate IV techniques in other frameworks of history and meaning. In particular, the intense visual and immer- sive landscapes produced by these works are reminiscent of 19th-century land- scape painting and its fascination with the un-representable, that is, the sub- lime. In addition, each also evokes early and mid-period modernist abstraction. For example, the looping spiraling texts of Cyclone.soc contain a cultural memory of the visual organization of Concrete Poetry, and the drawings that Reynolds produces in her sculptural practice share art-historical “DNA” with late or synthetic cubism and the formal experiments of Russian constructivism (Fig. 2). As has been suggested by Lev Manovich [17], the ability of visualization to pictorially render invisible phenomena equates to early modernism’s efforts to produce data in this manner is not arbitrary, an aesthetic act for its own sake. Rather, as the project visualizes the consequences of hidden social behavior in subtle, criti- cal ways, it goes beyond mere decoration. Experiencing the data tangibly gives what Reynolds has described as a “psychologi- cal dimension” to a work that images a hidden experience of urban life, one that is both shocking in its physicality and fas- cinating as a discharge of memory. In oc- cupying the same space as the audience, the work produces a physical equivalence for abstract facts, which enables the au- dience to reconnect to the situated acts they measure. Cyclone.soc and Mount Fear show that, when unshackled from analytics, visual- izations can convey complex subjective experiences in novel aesthetic forms. While they share an interest with scien- tifi c IV in the production of pictorial sur- rogates for invisible objects and forces, these experimental arts-based visualiza- tions are not strictly concerned with cognition. Rather, these are productions of a more ambiguous kind of embodied Fig. 3. Christian Nold, Bio Mapping project, 2004. (© Christian Nold) Participants wearing the response measuring units. Corby, Landscapes of Feeling 465 visible. Working with sociologist Andrew Barry [21], Kimbell decided not to for- mulate a prescriptive framework of what it meant to be political, but rather to de- velop a context within which it would be possible for participants to express what they considered it to be, by enabling them to associate specifi c activities with various forms of public visual display. Pindices consisted of a number of com- ponents: the interdisciplinary research carried out with Andrew Barry described above, a website, a gallery installation and the active input of self-selecting par- ticipants. A humble button badge was chosen to operate as both a unit of mea- surement and a visible demonstration of political preference and was employed in both website and installation versions of the work. The website [22] invited each user to participate in the project by cre- ating and nurturing a “personal political index” (pindex) published as an activity graph that measured his or her political endeavors over a set period. Each pindex could be annotated and was accessible and usable by others, therefore providing a public accounting that encouraged an awareness of the role and prevalence of political acts in participants’ lives (Article Frontispiece). The gallery installation offered a simi- lar way for audiences to identify with political acts, albeit in a different pub- lic context and manner (Fig. 5). This part of Pindices consisted of 12 clear vi- nyl tubes, each initially full of different colored badges printed with slogans in any way they see fi t. Thus, the work provides an alternative to institutionally directed visualization practices that is rooted in what Nold has described as so- cial or “bottom-up” data gathering [20]. Including the user as an interpretive agent in the work means that its results are ambiguous and deny fi xed meanings. The GSR mechanism itself is unable to distinguish between stress and excite- ment, implying that there is no “result” or “truth” to be discovered; rather Bio Mapping engenders an open-ended dis- cursive event whereby meanings emerge from the shared subjective responses of groups of users. Lucy Kimbell’s project Pindices (2005) shares some similarities with Nold’s proj- ect because it actively encourages user participation and is a “socially engaged” work. However, unlike Bio Mapping, it is less directly concerned with technologi- cal computer visualization, but rather brings together an assemblage of pro- cesses in order to measure and make tan- gible political activity, toward developing wider cultural conceptions of democratic processes. Existing tools, such as opinion polls, function effectively to show aggregates of public opinion, but are less useful as tools for the representation of indi- vidual conduct or belief. The Pindices project sought to develop a way in which these normally hidden activities could be tracked, with the aim of developing an expanded conception of what politi- cal activity is and how it might be made nots.” Christian Nold and Lucy Kimbell’s artworks in The Information exhibition ask what might happen if, rather than be subject to these top-down processes, people were able to develop their own customized information tools in order to aid social and personal empowerment [19]. Christian Nold’s Bio Mapping (2004– ongoing) allows the generation of data visualizations that link a user’s emotional response to location. The work consists of two elements: a wearable mechanism consisting of a lie detector and global positioning satellite (GPS) technology, which detects a user’s galvanic skin re- sponse (GSR) and position, and visual- ization software that maps this change to specifi c locales (Fig. 3). The unit works according to the theory that it is possible to capture and defi ne measurable parameters of a person’s internal emotional “state” through the levels of sweat users secrete through their hands. As part of the University of Westminster exhibition, self-selecting stu- dent volunteers were introduced to the project in a workshop situation. Each was fi tted with a device and sent out on an hour-long walk of the university and its immediate environs, which includes a hospital and a densely built-up urban environment. While this was happening each student’s changing location and level of arousal were sampled every 4 seconds by the device and the data down- loaded to a memory chip. This informa- tion was then fed into Google Earth and visualized as three-dimensional forms to produce, what Nold calls, an “emotion map” of the area (Fig. 4). After the students returned from the walk, another phase of the project was in- stigated whereby students were debriefed and asked to notate and analyze the sub- sequent visualization of their journeys, e.g. by commenting on how they felt at specifi c times and locations. This allowed a customization of the function of the work, in which some students tagged the map with subjective commentary while others preferred prosaic descriptions. The “emotion map” was then projected within the gallery space as an aggregate of the tagged walks enabling further group discussion of results to be developed. These conversations allowed a number of interesting outputs to accrue. For ex- ample, consensual interpretive processes allow participants a deeper purchase on ownership of their data. By taking analy- sis and information-gathering out of the hands of experts, persons normally con- sidered as “subjects” of study are enabled to construct understanding of results Fig. 4. Christian Nold, Bio Mapping project, 2004. (© Christian Nold) Screen shot showing aggregate of routes taken by student participants; peaks of greater height indicate strong physiological arousal. 466 Corby, Landscapes of Feeling Closing Remarks The works discussed in this article high- light some of the ways artists have found to bind scientifi c visualization processes to cultural activity. It is not my purpose to set these experimental artist-led ap- proaches against scientifi c visualization, but rather to lay bare useful correspon- dences and points of interest in order to build upon and extend current under- standings of the subject area. The relationship of these artist-based visualizations to scientifi c practice (and vice versa) is complex, as the works dis- cussed are cross-disciplinary but do not involve direct collaboration between scientists and artists. While the two disci- plines converge in terms of attempting to image invisible phenomena through data visualization, they diverge in terms of the types of knowledge and experiences they seek to create and their attitude to- ward the image as a locus of meaning. Production processes are also novel and generally bear little resemblance to ap- proaches in the sciences. The featured artists treat visualization processes as a form of creative media capable of func- tioning in broader aesthetic, critical and historical contexts. They work with an un- Western culture consists of fractured eco- nomic and social spheres that result from advanced, technologically driven, capital- ist, political and media hegemonies. As a result, these forces produce an illegible, discontinuous reality, its scrambled rela- tions functioning to confuse socioeco- nomic structures and disperse effective alternative political and cultural develop- ments. In response, Jameson has called for the visual arts to produce pictorial forms, or “cognitive maps,” which would both enable the comprehension and ori- entation of these abstract structures and prototype alternative modes of being and acting in the world [24]. Both Bio Mapping and Pindices may therefore read as forms of “cognitive map” as envisaged by Jameson, as they make visible hidden social, environmen- tal and political realities by transferring them into comprehensible material forms. They also produce a visualization practice that models a role for the art- ist/visualizer as an enabling agent, rather than a top-down interlocutor insofar as contexts for participation in information visualization processes are designed that provide ordinary members of the public with ways of grasping, accounting for and investing in their lives. derived from the list of activities identi- fi ed in the initial research phase: “I kept myself informed,” “I raised issues,” “I signed a petition,” amongst others; that is, each tube represented a political act. A dispensing mechanism at the bottom of each allowed visitors to select the badge they felt most empathy with, thus reduc- ing the level of buttons in any particu- lar tube. Simultaneously a visualization and a method for creating data directly, the visible effect of this process was the generation of a dynamic bar chart that made public the personal preferences of its users. However, for Kimbell, “hard results,” i.e. the level of badges in specifi c tubes and their fi nal destination, were of less importance than the effective- ness of the project to generate discourse around what its users considered politi- cally important. Thus framed, the work is explicitly concerned with consciousness- raising, in fi nding ways and means of threading together technological meth- ods with social processes, in order to en- able people to refl ect upon the political dimensions of their lives and their capaci- ties to act on individual and collective levels [23]. In his writing since 1980, Frederic Jameson has argued that contemporary Fig. 5. Lucy Kimbell and Andrew Barry, Pindices project, 2005, installation component. (© Lucy Kim- bell and Andrew Barry) Corby, Landscapes of Feeling 467 14. D. Cox. “Metaphorical Mapping: The Art of Vi- sualisation,” Aesthetic Computing, P.A. Fishwick (ed), Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2006, 89–114. 15. J. Elkins, “Art History and Images That Are Not Art,” The Art Bulletin, 77, No. 4, 1995, p. 553. 16. More information about Corby and Baily’s work can be found at ; doc- umentation of Abigail Reynolds’s work can be found at . The version of Cyclone.soc exhibited in The Information was a proto- type, one of a series of versions of a project that was developed throughout 2006. 17. L. Manovich, The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art, Au- gust 2002, Manovich, (accessed 16 November 2006). 18. Kallick-Wakker, p.309. 19. Further information about Christian Nold and Lucy Kimbell’s work can be found respectively at and . 20. C. Nold, “Christian Nold Ittaca project,” Bio Mapping, January 2004, (accessed 12 March 2006). 21. Dr. Andrew Barry is a member of the School of Geography at the Oxford University Centre for the Environment. 22. The version of Pindices shown in The Informa- tion did not include the website component of the project. The Pindices website no longer exists but documentation may be found at . 23. See Lucy Kimbell’s discussion of Pindices in “If Networked Art is the Answer: What Is the Question?” in Network Art: Practices and Positions, T. Corby (ed) London Routledge, 2005, 154–172. 24. F. Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, C. Nelson & L Grossberg (eds.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 347–357. 25. J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism) S. Glaser (Trans.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Acknowledgments The author would like to thank the Arts and Humani- ties Research Council of the United Kingdom for providing the research leave to complete this work. Manuscript received 3 January 2007. Tom Corby is an artist who currently holds the position of Reader in Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Westminster. His artworks made in collaboration with Gavin Baily have been exhibited internationally, and he has re- cently edited a collection of essays on Internet art: Networked Art: Practices and Posi- tions (published 2005). these works set out arguments for a pos- sible wider role for IV as a vehicle for cul- tural production that shifts its practices to wider areas of attention and is inclu- sive of different constituencies of users and publics. References and Notes Unedited references as provided by author. 1. The term “affect” is complex and is often used in place of “emotion” or “feeling”; when used here it refers to a sensation of embodied intensity generated through an encounter between affecting agencies, i.e. an artwork and audience. Or, as Brian Massumi puts it in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, rather than a personal emotion, affect is “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another”—an embodied condition that exists out- side of consciousness. See: G. Deleuze and F. Guat- tari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: The Athlone Press, 1996, p. xvi. 2. B.H. McCormick, T.A. DeFanti, and M.D. Brown (eds.) “Visualization in Scientifi c Computing: Report of the NSF Advisory Panel on Graphics, Image Pro- cessing and Workstations,” Computer Graphics, 21, No. 6, Nov., 1987. 3. E.R. Tufte, Envisioning Information, Connecticut: Graphics Press, 1990. 4. S.K. Card, J. Mackinlay & B. Shneiderman (eds.) Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers: San Francisco, CA, 1999. 5. M. Benedikt, “Information in Space Is Space in Information,” Images from Afar: Scientifi c Visualization an Anthology, A. Michelsen and F. Stjernfelt (eds.) Akademisk Forlag: Oslo University Press, 1996. 6. I. Kallick-Wakker, “Science Icons: The Visualiza- tion of Scientifi c Truths,” Leonardo, 27, No. 4, 1994, 309–315. 7. Examples of this form of Reinhardt’s work are featured on the Silverstein gallery website: “Ad Reinhardt—Art Comics and Satire 1949–1954,” . 8. Lombardi’s work can be found at the Pierogi gal- lery website, . 9. D. Cox, “What Can an Artist Do for Science: ‘Cosmic Voyage’ IMAX Film,” Art @ Science, C. Som- merer and L. Mignonneau (eds.) Springer-Verlag: New York. 10. See for example Vande Moere’s blog: “Info Aes- thetics,” . 11. Card et al [4], p. 6. 12. M. Kemp, “From science in art to the art of sci- ence,” Nature, 434, Issue 7031, 2005, 308–309. 13. J.J. van Wijk, “The Value of Visualisation,” C. Silva, E. Groeller, & H. Rushmeier (eds.) Proceed- ings of IEEE Visualization 2005, 2005, 79–86. derstanding of the image as a producer of meanings that are often ambiguous or multi-leveled and that produce embod- ied, affective, sensory experiences that elude rational description and measure- ment. This approach offers a contrast to scientifi c visualization, which fi rst and foremost strives for clarity of interpreta- tion in order to service analysis of specifi c phenomena. The tension between these different conceptions of the image provokes inter- esting questions for both subject domains about the limits of representation. If, for the sake of debate, we can broadly charac- terize understandings of the contempo- rary image in the arts as being dominated by post-modern debates as imagined by Baudrillard, i.e. a hobbled form (simula- cra) incapable of functioning as an en- abling agency for comprehension of the real, then what the sciences teach visual artists is that ways of producing images that are anchored to material realities are possible and that data visualization offers a route that enables a reconnection to it [25]. The models of visualization prac- tice produced by these artworks develop a new type of image that consists of ob- jective and subjective, informational and aesthetic components. It operates at the limits of what the image is understood to be in the visual arts. In doing so, these images also expand our understanding of what IV is and what it might be. They show that visual arts can usefully contrib- ute to the ongoing debates in science concerning epistemological issues of ob- jectivity of the image in IV, through the production of models of practice that ac- tively highlight and foreground the role of the general public in data gathering and interpretation of results. In other words, what is normally seen as prob- lematic in scientifi c IV—i.e. the ability of images produced to contain multi-level meanings—is productively turned to show that images grounded in objective data can be aligned with a more general- ized and discursive function in the visual arts as a system that produces affective experience and alternative narratives or perceptions of the world. In such terms leon.20088 leon.2008