Visualizing power.
I was browsing Netlex today, and I came across the work of Mark Lombardi, which is paper drawings visualizing the networks of relationships between all the players in, for example, the The BCCI Affair.
Now if this sounds familiar to denizens of the network art community, it is no surprise - Josh On’s “They Rule” has been a staple example of the data-visualization era of multimedia work since it first arrived on the scene in the early part of this decade. If you haven’t spent some time map-making on this site, I strongly recommend you do so right away. The difference here, of course, is the difference between a map and a cartographic technology.
Not too long ago, I was visiting my friend Rick Silva in Boulder, and he pointed me in the direction of the work of Lee Walton, who seems to be working the border of whatever it is that the network can do for visual art, and a more flatland style of data visualization. (I recommend immensely looking through some of his baseball drawings.)
I guess the point here is that while it seems like data visualization might seem like a dead-end anymore, there are still great things happening with it. Particularly with the institution of the ability to create data-visualization tools for wide public use, as well as the technology of “stem” or RAW data, the possibilities have become more interesting. In short, data visualization is a framework for creating pictures, “interactive” or otherwise, and there is nothing like looking at some pictures on a Saturday morning.
Except perhaps reading some Heidegger on a Saturday morning:
It remains true, nonetheless, that man in the technological age is, in a particularly striking way, challenged forth into revealing. That revealing concerns nature, above all, as the chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve. Accordingly, man’s ordering attitude and behavior display themselves first in the rise of modern physics as an exact science. Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces. Modern physics is not experimental physics because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature. Rather the reverse is true. Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.
-From The Question Concerning Technology (my italics)
Now the interesting question of the Gestell becomes a bit more blurry as it has clearly never been the exclusive province of science, but it has also never been more concrete that it is also precisely the movement of the “beaux arts.” And of course, this is the very solicitation of the above notion of the Gestell, which is to say (rather obviously) that the dis-ordering of the order of the enframing of the world is itself also the enframing of the world. Curiously, Gestell is also the name for a skeleton.
Lee Walton: Market Street Observations, #4, 2002 (detail)