Materializing the Entanglements that Haunt Data Visualizations

At the 2023 Conference on Biological Stoichiometry, artist Vaughn Bell (in collaboration with myself and biologist Hal Halvorson) devised a participatory workshop, Visualizing in the Messyverse, where researchers were prompted to play with pipettes of blue and yellow watercolor to tell new stories about their research. The project focused on challenging the way that normative scientific visualization strategies isolate and “tidy” data from the messy spaces of their collection. This paper considers a set of recent artworks that similarly intervene on potentially disembodied abstractions of data through rendering information in tactile and intimate material forms. The artists’ experiments with touch and scale operate at a juncture between data collection and data visualization that call into question hegemonic ways of seeing the organisms, substances, and computational patterns of scientific investigation. Projects like Terry James Conrad’s Psammochthonica anoxiki (2019) and Brooke Singer’s Site Profile Flags (2018-ongoing), which derive dyes from foraminifera testing and soil sampling respectively, ask viewers to engage more directly with microscopic organisms and their colorful ecosystems. And artworks like Sarah Rosalena Brady’s Above Below (2020) and Stacy Levy’s Collected Watershed (2020) interrogate approaches to mapping, of Martian topography and the Chesapeake Bay watershed respectively, with materials that invite more intimate ways of looking at and connecting to vast terrain. All of these projects, I argue, encourage broader “arts of noticing” and aim to generate more complete stories of complex ecological situations (Tsing 2015).