Palpably Present: Data Visualization, Art History, and the Tactility of Information
Session will present: In-PersonRecently, the field of data studies has looked to “data physicalization” to mobilize an important truth: that the felt properties of information are as important as the seen. As new technologies create objects or material artifacts to encode data through physical properties, they invite re-considerations of computational histories that have done this for centuries or even millennia, such as string-based recording devices like quipu. They also bespeak contemporary artistic practices that harness the haptic, generative qualities of tools and materials. This panel looks to new methods that probe the seemingly irresolvable quandary at the center of contemporary data visualization: that data is the source of empirical proof—a method of condensing experience and time into numbers—and that its visualization is a deeply rhetorical mode of image-making in and of itself. It operates in important relation to artistic practice, critical design practices, and art history, three fields that offer their own lively discourse on evidence and proof. The papers here proceed from the position that data has been made artificially visual, and that its connection to more embodied ways of knowing have in fact been available all along. Departing from (but being mindful of) art historian Johanna Drucker’s assertion that data visualization is “modeling interpretation”, the papers here look to feminist and Indigenous methods for finding our way back to tactile forms of data processing and more affective and complex ways of knowing. What possibilities arise when we think and feel our way through data’s origins and its constitutive tools?
Field(s) of Study:
Theory / Practice: Materiality of Art
Topics: Science and Art
Topics: Environmental Art
Topics: Queer/Gay
Field: Art History
Chairs:
Katie Anania
and
Dorota Biczel, Barnard College
Abstract Submissions Closed