Editorial Notes: Big Data in scale.ucsd.edu and YLEM
Posted by Brett Stalbaum on August 15, 2004 2:10 pm
Abstract
Artists confront the problems of data density and range in the aesthetic
of the sublime. Together with an introduction by Brett Stalbaum, these
essays by Lisa Jevbratt, Andrea Polli and Christina McPhee were first
published in print for YLEM Journal, Volume 24
Number 6, May-June 2004 (McPhee) and Volume 24 Number 8, July-August
2004 (Jevbratt & Polli), at the suggestion of Loren Means. The YLEM
Journal is the bimonthly publication of YLEM, a twenty-three-year-old
organization dedicated to the nexus of art, science, & technology. For
more information on joining YLEM and to view the YLEM Journal online,
visit www.ylem.org. The articles are co-published online in Scale,
scale.uscd.edu (Vol. 1, Issue 6+7).
Editorial notes
Moore's Law, Gordon Moore's famous prediction that processing speeds
double approximately every 18 months, has proven to be so prescient that
it long ago rose past the status of provocative futurist claim to the
level of pedestrian cultural assumption. But what has not yet become an
accepted cultural assumption is that Moore's law is at least matched,
and possibly exceeded by the exponential growth of data to be processed.
The relationship between humankind's ability to collect data and to
process and understand data is co-exponential: both are exploding. Data
sets from genomics, astrophysics, geography, geology, particle physics,
climatology, meteorology, nanotechnology, materials science and even the
search for ET are producing quantities of data that challenge the
technical limits of super computers, distributed computing, grid
computing, and superscalar simulation techniques. Even given Moore's
law, optical networks, and cheap mass storage, the problem of big data
is nevertheless looming larger as our ability to collect data actively
competes with our ability to process and digest it.
Computation has already become a nominal, if not tacit assumption in
contemporary art practice due to the ubiquitous implementation of
computer and communications technologies in all aspects of our emerging
global culture. How does big data impinge on the present generation of
representational artists who operate under the assumption of a rich
computational environment? And what are the emerging aesthetic and
conceptual parameters that impinge on the practice of artists who
consciously recognize data and coding as the primary expressions of an
art practice wherein the notions of "representation" are not limited to
narrowly prescribed assumptions regarding a specifically graphical or
interactive interface and networked distribution as the primary cultural
operatives between artist and audience? What other questions arise in an
environment where we live in a constant streaming wash of data, and what
are the issues surrounding how artists might help interpret both
cultural and scientific phenomena?
Lev Manovich raises a particularly interesting issue in his 2002 essay
titled "The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art". In it, Manovich identified
an aesthetic approach to big data that seeks to interpret large data
sets on much the same terms as designers and scientists seek to analyze
data; a pursuit which he describes as the exact opposite goal of
romantic art. "If Romantic artists thought of certain phenomena and
effects as un-representable, as something which goes beyond the limits
of human senses and reason, data visualization artists aim at precisely
the opposite: to map such phenomena into a representation whose scale is
comparable to the scales of human perception and cognition." He goes on
to form a critique of such practice, and raises the question of "How new
media can represent the ambiguity, the otherness, the
multi-dimensionality of our experience... In short, rather than trying
hard to pursue the anti-sublime ideal, data visualization artists should
also not forget that art has the unique license to portray human
subjectivity including its fundamental new dimension of being
'immersed in data.'"
The essays published in YLEM Journal, Volume 24 Number 6, May-June 2004
(McPhee) and Volume 24 Number 8, July-August 2004 (Jevbratt & Polli)
look to the writings of two artists whose practice conspicuously
intersects with questions relating to the romantic and the sublime.
Their writings, each in a different manner, suggest possible paths
toward answering the many issues that have been raised by the explosion
of, and our immersion in, big data. Interestingly, Andrea Polli's
"Atmospherics/Weather Works: Artistic Sonification of Meteorological
Data" begins with a quotation from the romantic American poet Walt
Whitman's "Proud Music of the Storm". Polli is interested in how
sonification of large data sets differs aesthetically from
visualization, and in helping a sonic "language or series of languages
for communicating this mass of data needs to evolve." Not only does
Polli's text clearly describe the types of aesthetic choices that were
necessary in the sonification of the President's Day Snowstorm and
Hurricane Bob data, but also reveals a successful example of interaction
between and artist and scientist(s) to reinforce and potentially uncover
new knowledge through what she claims is a potentially more visceral
sonic experience of data.
In a related article which was originally intended to be published
alongside the articles in this issue, (see YLEM Volume 24 Number 6,
May-June 2004), Christina McPhee discusses data sonification "Sense of
Place and Sonic Topologies: Towards a Telemimetic Sublime in the Data
Landscape". Polli and McPhee share an interest in data sonification and
collaboration with science, but it is especially interesting that they
also meet up in something of a rapprochement with the romantic tradition
that Manovich discusses. Polli's notion of how data sonification might
lend to a "physical and emotional exhilaration [that] enhances the
scientist's understanding" is congruent with McPhee's notion that
"...one may turn a gaze to what cannot be 'seen'. Here we move into a
zone of the sublime." In an abstract sense, it is the same matter of
scale that the romantics faced via exposure to a new, often breathtaking
landscape (during the period of colonialist expansion in previous
centuries), that is today expressed technically as a matter of scaling
systems of processing as humanity is faced by the expansion of
scientific data. The current context reactivates the sublime as an issue
for contemporary artists working with large data sets.
It should be noted that this rapprochement with the romantic and the
sublime is in no way a conservative one. The sublime, which can also be
described as a particularly human cognitive response to decision making
circumstances wherein the amount of data overwhelms one's deductive
reasoning capabilities, yet under which humans are more often than not
able to think and act to yield successful outcomes, is one of the
general capabilities to date that has evaded machine intelligence. It
seems that the prodigious deductive abilities of computational systems
can not yet simulate the prodigious inferential capabilities of the
human mind. We have not yet entered the period of strong AI predicted in
JCR Licklider's 1960 essay "Human-Computer Symbiosis", but rather we
continue to exist in the symbiotic phase where "Computing machines can
do readily, well, and rapidly many things that are difficult or
impossible for man, and men can do readily and well, though not very
rapidly, many things that are difficult or impossible for computers."
Big data, as it turns out, is a challenge even to this successful
symbiosis, and the work of both Polli and McPhee can be read as attempts
to engage the human capability to experience the sublime as part of the
process of understanding big data. The sublime is something that people
can participate in readily and well, and exploring how that capability
might assist the human drive to develop and refine knowledge is
something that artists are presently working through, in practice and
theory.
Lisa Jevbratt's "A Prospect of the Sublime in Data Visualizations", is
both an attempt to theorize the contemporary situation regarding artists
and the sublime in a theorizing mode, and an answer to Manovich's use of
her work as an example of the anti-sublime ideal. In her essay, she
explores the potential for a symbiotic human-machine space to be
understood via the sublime in terms of a "methodological distancing"
including the concept of "Via Negativa" and a proper appreciation of the
opportunistic nature of meaning that would allow us to take into account
(romantic) philosopher Emmanuel Kants notion regarding the "mobilizing=
effect the sublime has on our organizing abilities." Jevbratt thinks
this would help us avoid "The most common mistake in data
visualizations...", that being "not too much information but too little,
their 'images' of the data landscape are not high resolution enough for
an esthetic decision to be made."
On behalf of YLEM's executive editor Loren Means and the YLEM board, and
the journal Scale (http://scale.ucsd.edu) which is publishing the
collection of essays online, I hope that these writings will help
further define the problem of the sublime and big data, and stimulate
further discussion of the issues and opportunities presented to artists
by the problem of big data generally.
(See online or print versions for footnotes...)
Artists confront the problems of data density and range in the aesthetic
of the sublime. Together with an introduction by Brett Stalbaum, these
essays by Lisa Jevbratt, Andrea Polli and Christina McPhee were first
published in print for YLEM Journal, Volume 24
Number 6, May-June 2004 (McPhee) and Volume 24 Number 8, July-August
2004 (Jevbratt & Polli), at the suggestion of Loren Means. The YLEM
Journal is the bimonthly publication of YLEM, a twenty-three-year-old
organization dedicated to the nexus of art, science, & technology. For
more information on joining YLEM and to view the YLEM Journal online,
visit www.ylem.org. The articles are co-published online in Scale,
scale.uscd.edu (Vol. 1, Issue 6+7).
Editorial notes
Moore's Law, Gordon Moore's famous prediction that processing speeds
double approximately every 18 months, has proven to be so prescient that
it long ago rose past the status of provocative futurist claim to the
level of pedestrian cultural assumption. But what has not yet become an
accepted cultural assumption is that Moore's law is at least matched,
and possibly exceeded by the exponential growth of data to be processed.
The relationship between humankind's ability to collect data and to
process and understand data is co-exponential: both are exploding. Data
sets from genomics, astrophysics, geography, geology, particle physics,
climatology, meteorology, nanotechnology, materials science and even the
search for ET are producing quantities of data that challenge the
technical limits of super computers, distributed computing, grid
computing, and superscalar simulation techniques. Even given Moore's
law, optical networks, and cheap mass storage, the problem of big data
is nevertheless looming larger as our ability to collect data actively
competes with our ability to process and digest it.
Computation has already become a nominal, if not tacit assumption in
contemporary art practice due to the ubiquitous implementation of
computer and communications technologies in all aspects of our emerging
global culture. How does big data impinge on the present generation of
representational artists who operate under the assumption of a rich
computational environment? And what are the emerging aesthetic and
conceptual parameters that impinge on the practice of artists who
consciously recognize data and coding as the primary expressions of an
art practice wherein the notions of "representation" are not limited to
narrowly prescribed assumptions regarding a specifically graphical or
interactive interface and networked distribution as the primary cultural
operatives between artist and audience? What other questions arise in an
environment where we live in a constant streaming wash of data, and what
are the issues surrounding how artists might help interpret both
cultural and scientific phenomena?
Lev Manovich raises a particularly interesting issue in his 2002 essay
titled "The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art". In it, Manovich identified
an aesthetic approach to big data that seeks to interpret large data
sets on much the same terms as designers and scientists seek to analyze
data; a pursuit which he describes as the exact opposite goal of
romantic art. "If Romantic artists thought of certain phenomena and
effects as un-representable, as something which goes beyond the limits
of human senses and reason, data visualization artists aim at precisely
the opposite: to map such phenomena into a representation whose scale is
comparable to the scales of human perception and cognition." He goes on
to form a critique of such practice, and raises the question of "How new
media can represent the ambiguity, the otherness, the
multi-dimensionality of our experience... In short, rather than trying
hard to pursue the anti-sublime ideal, data visualization artists should
also not forget that art has the unique license to portray human
subjectivity including its fundamental new dimension of being
'immersed in data.'"
The essays published in YLEM Journal, Volume 24 Number 6, May-June 2004
(McPhee) and Volume 24 Number 8, July-August 2004 (Jevbratt & Polli)
look to the writings of two artists whose practice conspicuously
intersects with questions relating to the romantic and the sublime.
Their writings, each in a different manner, suggest possible paths
toward answering the many issues that have been raised by the explosion
of, and our immersion in, big data. Interestingly, Andrea Polli's
"Atmospherics/Weather Works: Artistic Sonification of Meteorological
Data" begins with a quotation from the romantic American poet Walt
Whitman's "Proud Music of the Storm". Polli is interested in how
sonification of large data sets differs aesthetically from
visualization, and in helping a sonic "language or series of languages
for communicating this mass of data needs to evolve." Not only does
Polli's text clearly describe the types of aesthetic choices that were
necessary in the sonification of the President's Day Snowstorm and
Hurricane Bob data, but also reveals a successful example of interaction
between and artist and scientist(s) to reinforce and potentially uncover
new knowledge through what she claims is a potentially more visceral
sonic experience of data.
In a related article which was originally intended to be published
alongside the articles in this issue, (see YLEM Volume 24 Number 6,
May-June 2004), Christina McPhee discusses data sonification "Sense of
Place and Sonic Topologies: Towards a Telemimetic Sublime in the Data
Landscape". Polli and McPhee share an interest in data sonification and
collaboration with science, but it is especially interesting that they
also meet up in something of a rapprochement with the romantic tradition
that Manovich discusses. Polli's notion of how data sonification might
lend to a "physical and emotional exhilaration [that] enhances the
scientist's understanding" is congruent with McPhee's notion that
"...one may turn a gaze to what cannot be 'seen'. Here we move into a
zone of the sublime." In an abstract sense, it is the same matter of
scale that the romantics faced via exposure to a new, often breathtaking
landscape (during the period of colonialist expansion in previous
centuries), that is today expressed technically as a matter of scaling
systems of processing as humanity is faced by the expansion of
scientific data. The current context reactivates the sublime as an issue
for contemporary artists working with large data sets.
It should be noted that this rapprochement with the romantic and the
sublime is in no way a conservative one. The sublime, which can also be
described as a particularly human cognitive response to decision making
circumstances wherein the amount of data overwhelms one's deductive
reasoning capabilities, yet under which humans are more often than not
able to think and act to yield successful outcomes, is one of the
general capabilities to date that has evaded machine intelligence. It
seems that the prodigious deductive abilities of computational systems
can not yet simulate the prodigious inferential capabilities of the
human mind. We have not yet entered the period of strong AI predicted in
JCR Licklider's 1960 essay "Human-Computer Symbiosis", but rather we
continue to exist in the symbiotic phase where "Computing machines can
do readily, well, and rapidly many things that are difficult or
impossible for man, and men can do readily and well, though not very
rapidly, many things that are difficult or impossible for computers."
Big data, as it turns out, is a challenge even to this successful
symbiosis, and the work of both Polli and McPhee can be read as attempts
to engage the human capability to experience the sublime as part of the
process of understanding big data. The sublime is something that people
can participate in readily and well, and exploring how that capability
might assist the human drive to develop and refine knowledge is
something that artists are presently working through, in practice and
theory.
Lisa Jevbratt's "A Prospect of the Sublime in Data Visualizations", is
both an attempt to theorize the contemporary situation regarding artists
and the sublime in a theorizing mode, and an answer to Manovich's use of
her work as an example of the anti-sublime ideal. In her essay, she
explores the potential for a symbiotic human-machine space to be
understood via the sublime in terms of a "methodological distancing"
including the concept of "Via Negativa" and a proper appreciation of the
opportunistic nature of meaning that would allow us to take into account
(romantic) philosopher Emmanuel Kants notion regarding the "mobilizing=
effect the sublime has on our organizing abilities." Jevbratt thinks
this would help us avoid "The most common mistake in data
visualizations...", that being "not too much information but too little,
their 'images' of the data landscape are not high resolution enough for
an esthetic decision to be made."
On behalf of YLEM's executive editor Loren Means and the YLEM board, and
the journal Scale (http://scale.ucsd.edu) which is publishing the
collection of essays online, I hope that these writings will help
further define the problem of the sublime and big data, and stimulate
further discussion of the issues and opportunities presented to artists
by the problem of big data generally.
(See online or print versions for footnotes...)
> Abstract
> Artists confront the problems of data density and range in the
> aesthetic
> of the sublime. Together with an introduction by Brett Stalbaum,
> these
> essays by Lisa Jevbratt, Andrea Polli and Christina McPhee were
> first
> published in print for YLEM Journal, Volume 24
> Number 6, May-June 2004 (McPhee) and Volume 24 Number 8,
> July-August
> 2004 (Jevbratt & Polli), at the suggestion of Loren Means. The YLEM
> Journal is the bimonthly publication of YLEM, a
> twenty-three-year-old
> organization dedicated to the nexus of art, science, & technology.
> For
> more information on joining YLEM and to view the YLEM Journal
> online,
> visit www.ylem.org. The articles are co-published online in Scale,
> scale.uscd.edu (Vol. 1, Issue 6+7).
>
> Editorial notes
>
> Moore's Law, Gordon Moore's famous prediction that processing
> speeds
> double approximately every 18 months, has proven to be so prescient
> that
> it long ago rose past the status of provocative futurist claim to
> the
> level of pedestrian cultural assumption. But what has not yet become
> an
> accepted cultural assumption is that Moore's law is at least
> matched,
> and possibly exceeded by the exponential growth of data to be
> processed.
> The relationship between humankind's ability to collect data and to
> process and understand data is co-exponential: both are exploding.
> Data
> sets from genomics, astrophysics, geography, geology, particle
> physics,
> climatology, meteorology, nanotechnology, materials science and even
> the
> search for ET are producing quantities of data that challenge the
> technical limits of super computers, distributed computing, grid
> computing, and superscalar simulation techniques. Even given
> Moore's
> law, optical networks, and cheap mass storage, the problem of big
> data
> is nevertheless looming larger as our ability to collect data
> actively
> competes with our ability to process and digest it.
>
> Computation has already become a nominal, if not tacit assumption
> in
> contemporary art practice due to the ubiquitous implementation of
> computer and communications technologies in all aspects of our
> emerging
> global culture. How does big data impinge on the present generation
> of
> representational artists who operate under the assumption of a rich
> computational environment? And what are the emerging aesthetic and
> conceptual parameters that impinge on the practice of artists who
> consciously recognize data and coding as the primary expressions of
> an
> art practice wherein the notions of "representation" are not limited
> to
> narrowly prescribed assumptions regarding a specifically graphical
> or
> interactive interface and networked distribution as the primary
> cultural
> operatives between artist and audience? What other questions arise in
> an
> environment where we live in a constant streaming wash of data, and
> what
> are the issues surrounding how artists might help interpret both
> cultural and scientific phenomena?
>
> Lev Manovich raises a particularly interesting issue in his 2002
> essay
> titled "The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art". In it, Manovich
> identified
> an aesthetic approach to big data that seeks to interpret large
> data
> sets on much the same terms as designers and scientists seek to
> analyze
> data; a pursuit which he describes as the exact opposite goal of
> romantic art. "If Romantic artists thought of certain phenomena and
> effects as un-representable, as something which goes beyond the
> limits
> of human senses and reason, data visualization artists aim at
> precisely
> the opposite: to map such phenomena into a representation whose scale
> is
> comparable to the scales of human perception and cognition." He goes
> on
> to form a critique of such practice, and raises the question of "How
> new
> media can represent the ambiguity, the otherness, the
> multi-dimensionality of our experience... In short, rather than
> trying
> hard to pursue the anti-sublime ideal, data visualization artists
> should
> also not forget that art has the unique license to portray human
> subjectivity including its fundamental new dimension of being
> 'immersed in data.'"
>
> The essays published in YLEM Journal, Volume 24 Number 6, May-June
> 2004
> (McPhee) and Volume 24 Number 8, July-August 2004 (Jevbratt &
> Polli)
> look to the writings of two artists whose practice conspicuously
> intersects with questions relating to the romantic and the sublime.
> Their writings, each in a different manner, suggest possible paths
> toward answering the many issues that have been raised by the
> explosion
> of, and our immersion in, big data. Interestingly, Andrea Polli's
> "Atmospherics/Weather Works: Artistic Sonification of
> Meteorological
> Data" begins with a quotation from the romantic American poet Walt
> Whitman's "Proud Music of the Storm". Polli is interested in how
> sonification of large data sets differs aesthetically from
> visualization, and in helping a sonic "language or series of
> languages
> for communicating this mass of data needs to evolve." Not only does
> Polli's text clearly describe the types of aesthetic choices that
> were
> necessary in the sonification of the President's Day Snowstorm and
> Hurricane Bob data, but also reveals a successful example of
> interaction
> between and artist and scientist(s) to reinforce and potentially
> uncover
> new knowledge through what she claims is a potentially more
> visceral
> sonic experience of data.
>
> In a related article which was originally intended to be published
> alongside the articles in this issue, (see YLEM Volume 24 Number 6,
> May-June 2004), Christina McPhee discusses data sonification "Sense
> of
> Place and Sonic Topologies: Towards a Telemimetic Sublime in the
> Data
> Landscape". Polli and McPhee share an interest in data sonification
> and
> collaboration with science, but it is especially interesting that
> they
> also meet up in something of a rapprochement with the romantic
> tradition
> that Manovich discusses. Polli's notion of how data sonification
> might
> lend to a "physical and emotional exhilaration [that] enhances the
> scientist's understanding" is congruent with McPhee's notion that
> "...one may turn a gaze to what cannot be 'seen'. Here we move into
> a
> zone of the sublime." In an abstract sense, it is the same matter
> of
> scale that the romantics faced via exposure to a new, often
> breathtaking
> landscape (during the period of colonialist expansion in previous
> centuries), that is today expressed technically as a matter of
> scaling
> systems of processing as humanity is faced by the expansion of
> scientific data. The current context reactivates the sublime as an
> issue
> for contemporary artists working with large data sets.
>
> It should be noted that this rapprochement with the romantic and
> the
> sublime is in no way a conservative one. The sublime, which can also
> be
> described as a particularly human cognitive response to decision
> making
> circumstances wherein the amount of data overwhelms one's deductive
> reasoning capabilities, yet under which humans are more often than
> not
> able to think and act to yield successful outcomes, is one of the
> general capabilities to date that has evaded machine intelligence.
> It
> seems that the prodigious deductive abilities of computational
> systems
> can not yet simulate the prodigious inferential capabilities of the
> human mind. We have not yet entered the period of strong AI predicted
> in
> JCR Licklider's 1960 essay "Human-Computer Symbiosis", but rather
> we
> continue to exist in the symbiotic phase where "Computing machines
> can
> do readily, well, and rapidly many things that are difficult or
> impossible for man, and men can do readily and well, though not
> very
> rapidly, many things that are difficult or impossible for
> computers."
> Big data, as it turns out, is a challenge even to this successful
> symbiosis, and the work of both Polli and McPhee can be read as
> attempts
> to engage the human capability to experience the sublime as part of
> the
> process of understanding big data. The sublime is something that
> people
> can participate in readily and well, and exploring how that
> capability
> might assist the human drive to develop and refine knowledge is
> something that artists are presently working through, in practice
> and
> theory.
>
> Lisa Jevbratt's "A Prospect of the Sublime in Data Visualizations",
> is
> both an attempt to theorize the contemporary situation regarding
> artists
> and the sublime in a theorizing mode, and an answer to Manovich's use
> of
> her work as an example of the anti-sublime ideal. In her essay, she
> explores the potential for a symbiotic human-machine space to be
> understood via the sublime in terms of a "methodological
> distancing"
> including the concept of "Via Negativa" and a proper appreciation of
> the
> opportunistic nature of meaning that would allow us to take into
> account
> (romantic) philosopher Emmanuel Kants notion regarding the
> "mobilizing=
>
> effect the sublime has on our organizing abilities." Jevbratt
> thinks
> this would help us avoid "The most common mistake in data
> visualizations...", that being "not too much information but too
> little,
> their 'images' of the data landscape are not high resolution enough
> for
> an esthetic decision to be made."
>
> On behalf of YLEM's executive editor Loren Means and the YLEM board,
> and
> the journal Scale (http://scale.ucsd.edu) which is publishing the
> collection of essays online, I hope that these writings will help
> further define the problem of the sublime and big data, and
> stimulate
> further discussion of the issues and opportunities presented to
> artists
> by the problem of big data generally.
>
> (See online or print versions for footnotes...)
>
>