PUBLIC MARKS with tag "data mining"

One of the 8 works I created for the Data Art Show at the Pink Hobo Gallery in Minneapolis.

All these pieces are a pun on the new craze for data visualization. The goals of data visualization as I understand them are to make complicated issues more understandable, to make obscured connections visible and to reveal hidden patterns in the data. After all these tasks have been solved ideally the result should be aesthetically pleasing as well.

But when I look around what is being done in data visualization today I have the suspicion that in many cases the design is more important than the actual information and that the use of data is more an excuse to justify the use of aesthetics.

Since I do not have a problem with aesthetics for their own sake in these pieces I deliberately took the opposite direction. Since I wanted to create something visually interesting I made up my own data which would give me the desired results. All these works are the result of generative algorithms, so all the elements and their connections are actually data and not something I assembled manually in Illustrator.

WHAT DOES RANDOMNESS LOOK LIKE?

RANDOM WALK asks this question and presents experiments in mathematics and physics, showing the mysterious interaction of chaos and order in randomness. The project RANDOM WALK simulates randomness in visualizations, which are easy to understand. In this way, it delivers insight into a phenomenon, which has so far remained unexplained.

Vite vite, il ne reste que deux jours pour dire tout le bien que l’on pense de l’exposition « Data Meanings » que proposent les Rencontres Paris/Berlin/Madrid, un festival de propositions courtes, moyennes, longues, de films d’avant-garde et expérimentaux, de fictions barrées et de documentaires dérangeants.

Et s’il faut se précipiter à l’exposition « Data Meanings » au théâtre Paris-Villette, c’est parce que sa cohérence tient précisément de cet éventail de possibilités artistiques du traitement (et du retraitement, façon compost) de l’image. Et parce qu’elle investit le théâtre, ses couloirs, ses combles en proposant un parcours intelligent, éclectique et international. Oui, les données informatiques ont aujourd’hui la même qualité que ces images qui développent chez nos contemporains l’adhésion à des fictions au cinéma.

Imaginez un monde transparent, où nos désirs les plus intimes seraient négociés sur un marché global et leurs risques évalués et optimisés.

Le Dadamètre, outil de profiling du langage et de surveillance narrative des mouvements artistiques, annonce une nouvelle alliance entre l'art, la science et une finance globalisée enfin libérée des cataclysmes boursiers.

Utilisant technologies du Web 2.0, réseaux de neurones, théorie des graphes, linguistique quantitative, il permet de cartographier, et bientôt de prédire, tendances artistiques ou mutations sociales.

Valeurs boursières, prises pour paroles d’évangile dans les domaines de l’économie, code d’accès pour échanges d’objets capitalisés chez E-bay, unité de mesure sémantique pour le grand Google : tout est quantifié, mouliné, analysé selon des critères qu’une poignée d’artistes s’emploie à substituer, détourner, ou transposer humour, graphs et cartographies à l’appui.

The ability to collect, store, and manage data is increasing quickly, but our ability to understand it remains constant. In an attempt to gain better understanding of data, fields such as information visualization, data mining and graphic design are employed, each solving an isolated part of the specific problem, but failing in a broader sense: there are too many unsolved problems in the visualization of complex data. As a solution, this dissertation proposes that the individual fields be brought together as part of a singular process titled Computational Information Design.

This is the first step in an ongoing social experiment, based on twitter. inspired by wefeelfine and drawing data from summize, hand-crafted by amy hoy and thomas fuchs.