click opera - Dataporn

November 2009


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	Thu, Dec. 4th, 2008 12:00 am

Dataporn

There may or may not be an inherent beauty in data, but there are certainly more or less beautiful ways to represent it, and the art of visual number-crunching has become a vital and a fashionable one. I'm calling it dataporn here, but others call it Infosthetics and titillate daily with "3D Visualization of Semantic Space" and "Community Authored Flowcharts" (you hum it, I'll strum it).

There's also a new book from Die Gestalten Verlag -- a lush coffee-table survey of dataporn -- called Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design, a trendy tome which promises "chart-like diagrams such as bar, plot, line diagrams and spider charts, graph-based diagrams including line, matrix, process flow, and molecular diagrams to extremely complex three-dimensional diagrams". Wow, my data centres are overloading!

What interests me is that functionality is, in itself, an aesthetic. The video podcast DGV have put together for Data Flow (featuring co-editors Nicolas Bourquin and Thibaud Tissot) is set to urgent space jazz, the kind of thing that might have soundtracked a 1960s world's fair. The form data assumes isn't everything, but it isn't nothing either; although I applaud the principle of The Designer's Field Guide to Sustainability, I can't help being put off by the chart's wishy-washy colours. On the other hand, the chart of Occupations by IQ Range is so fascinating that I don't care whether it's well-presented or not (it isn't). The content trumps the form.

The designers of the Data Flow book have taken their mission to make data sexy so seriously they've even slipped in a few naked shots of couples touching each other's genitals amongst the pies, bars and flows. It's unnecessary; good data well-presented should be enough to have today's datapornoholic in the convulsions of a massive climactic seizure.

endoftheseason

	Wed, Dec. 3rd, 2008 10:17 pm (UTC)

One of those things looks like some sort of Tube map. . . . Is it?

lord_whimsy

	Wed, Dec. 3rd, 2008 10:32 pm (UTC)

Looks to be a flow chart. Lots of ways to map out processes, including subway systems.

This might interest. And this.

directbetween

Dr. Oktober

	Wed, Dec. 3rd, 2008 11:03 pm (UTC)

I was surprised that David Byrne's diagrams didn't have him in the center (and eventually link back to him).

lord_whimsy

	Thu, Dec. 4th, 2008 01:39 am (UTC)

I think you have him confused with me.

imomus

	Wed, Dec. 3rd, 2008 10:35 pm (UTC)

It does look like one, doesn't it? I can't tell you for sure, because I don't have the book -- I browsed it at ProQM today, but didn't fork out the fifty euros to buy it. I used to live next door to the DGV press officer, but she's moved several blocks away, alas, so I can't even scam a copy easily. And the DGV website seems to have crashed, brought down, no doubt, by millions of masturbating datapornoholics.

skazat

Alex à Paris

	Wed, Dec. 3rd, 2008 10:29 pm (UTC)

Wow, this stuff is so beautiful. I always get pulled into it and want to make my own - but, never have, although a lot of my work has been systems-oriented.

I'll have to maybe pick it up,

shadowshark

ShadowShark

	Thu, Dec. 4th, 2008 12:16 am (UTC)

Hey, ass! Perhaps you dislike the chart of Occupations by IQ Range because it puts "creative occs" lower than researchers and academics! In any case, it would be great to see you take your lectures on the road, too. Is there any reason you couldn't combine a night of reading, musical performance, and lecture, in an aleatoric combination to be determined at the onset of the evening?

shadowshark

ShadowShark

	Thu, Dec. 4th, 2008 12:17 am (UTC)

*and take said performances on tour outside of Europe, I meant to say!

(Anonymous)

	Thu, Dec. 4th, 2008 01:26 am (UTC)

Data Pods

I have a copy on my desk at the moment while designing some info graphics for a book. The work in Data Flow is overall very fresh feeling. You might already know Edward Tufte's work. He is sort of the Sagmeister of info graphics( fame wise at least). He has a slightly fuddy duddy aesthetic, but his delivery is great.
-David Holl
instantcontemporary.org

slowtiger
slowtiger

	Thu, Dec. 4th, 2008 08:55 am (UTC)

Sure I must see the whole book (in the shop), but from the examples I think it's overly fancy - graphic designer's porn. I still favour the books by an old master in that field, Edward R. Tufte. Have a look at http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi for yourself.

realrealgone

	Thu, Dec. 4th, 2008 11:24 am (UTC)

speaking of books, is The Cabinet Of Momus or Caledonian Humourist an early leak of your new publication, "your merriness"?

Edited at 2008-12-04 11:30 am (UTC)

akabe

alin huma

	Thu, Dec. 4th, 2008 04:33 pm (UTC)

you might enjoy these

http://www.worldmapper.org/

thebigcroute
thebigcroute

	Thu, Dec. 4th, 2008 06:39 pm (UTC)

The theme of this year's Select Media Festival in Chicago was "Infoporn".

Check 'er out: http://selectmediafestival.org/

mcfnord

Bisquit Face

	Fri, Dec. 5th, 2008 08:05 am (UTC)

once you briefly showed my data art in your lj.
then people complained so you took it down.
but i remember, and i was flattered.
i've added a sensor you might fancy, on the right side.

here's the new data for the new data art i'm working on now:
http://ljmindmap.com/history/imomus.xml

i'm trying my first application on the data now.

bonsai_human
Bonsai Human

	Fri, Dec. 5th, 2008 12:11 pm (UTC)

My god, a woman with breasts! On Momus's journal!

I'm semi-horrified!