Abstract
The ostentatious beauty of most contemporary information visualization projects is one of the most contested areas of current research. What kind of an aestheticization is occurring here? In step with economists, graphic designers, and scientists, many contemporary new media artists, even when they are constructing critical interventions at the level of shareware and inversions of government spyware, convert impersonal, seemingly unimaginable quantities of data into excruciatingly seductive packages or mini-spectacles that fit conveniently into one’s browser.
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Notes
For a basic introduction to the use of Information Visualization as an artistic medium see Fernanda B. Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, “Artistic Data Visualization: Beyond Visual Analytics,” in Online Communities and Social Computing: Second International OCSC (Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 2007), pp. 182–191.
I am distilling ideas here first presented by Lev Manovich in “The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art” (unpublished, Berlin, 2002), http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/data_art.doc (accessed 3 December 2011); and Warren Sack, “Discourse Architecture and Very Large Scale Conversation,” in Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Manovich positioned data visualization as a new cultural form. Sack underlined this argument, but presented data visualization as a novel form of information that expanded into new forms of “discourse architecture”—each a kind of digital public square—visualized, networked sites that provided new environments for conversation, discussion and exchange (Sack 242). Both of these authors are preceded by the concepts of social engineering and social computing. The former term was coined by Karl Popperin The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962),
I am distilling ideas here first presented by Lev Manovich in “The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art” (unpublished, Berlin, 2002), http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/data_art.doc (accessed 3 December 2011); and Warren Sack, “Discourse Architecture and Very Large Scale Conversation,” in Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Manovich positioned data visualization as a new cultural form. Sack underlined this argument, but presented data visualization as a novel form of information that expanded into new forms of “discourse architecture”—each a kind of digital public square—visualized, networked sites that provided new environments for conversation, discussion and exchange (Sack 242). Both of these authors are preceded by the concepts of social engineering and social computing. The former term was coined by Karl Popperin The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962),
See Martin Wattenberg’s Map of the Market 1998, http://www.bewitched.com/marketmap.html (accessed 3 December 2011).
Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, “About Fleshmap,” http://www.fleshmap.com/about.html (accessed 3 December 2011).
See Chris Jordon, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait (Berlin: Prestel Publishing, 2009).
Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Culture in France and Germany since, 1989 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), p. 20.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
See Frazer Ward, “The Haunted Museum,” October, 73 (Summer 1995), pp. 71–89;
Miwon Kwon, “Public Art as Publicity,” in The Place of the Public Sphere? On the Establishment of Publics and Counter-Publics, ed. Simon Sheikh (Berlin: b_books, 2005).
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© 2012 Melissa Ragona
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Ragona, M. (2012). Beauty and Danger: The Aestheticization of Information in Contemporary Art. In: Howells, R., Ritivoi, A.D., Schachter, J. (eds) Outrage: Art, Controversy, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283542_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283542_13
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