Response to Aesthetics of Information Visualization & The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art

As other respondents have already pointed out (one of the advantages of posting late), the texts by Warren Sack and Lev Manovich are problematic in respectively similar and frustrating ways. In both cases, the authors seem to be attempting to stake out their conceptual territory for building a grand, evaluative structure for information visualization as art, but little new construction is in evidence at the end of the articles. Ultimately, I think this is because the questions raised by both Sack and Manovich are reducible to the hoary conundrum of "What purpose does art serve?" Unsurprisingly, they both arrive at slightly different conclusions that appear to prescriptively align with their own inclinations rather than investigate and reveal the motivations of the artists that they cite. Or perhaps, more accurately, neither author adequately explains why their particular conceptions of “good” information visualization are more relevant than any other.

The general direction of Sack's and Manovich's first few pages each superficially describe information visualization as a means of communication through which the artist-designer is attempting to convey information that, either because of excessive breadth or ephemeral nature, is not communicable in an efficient manner using non-visual means. Then, each proceeds to make a different claim—in Sack's case that information visualization should be viewed through the lens of the body politic, and in Manovich's case that information visualization should try to embrace subjectivity. These assertions are then drawn out through the rest of the respective texts without any useful support. Sack cites political works such as Josh On's They Rule as a political information visualization without actually explaining why that is important, necessary, or even effective. Manovich describes Daniel Liebeskind's locative mapping in the Jewish Museum Berlin as arbitrary because he does not know why it was executed in the manner that it was. No evidence is provided that Liebeskind's decision was, in fact arbitrary, but Manovich then proceeds to suggest that information artists embrace arbitrariness because he finds it to be more poetic.  But neither Sack nor Manovich really explain why their described approaches are important; it is apparently assumed to be self-evident.

Of course, it is quite possible that I am simply reacting negatively to the prescriptive nature of both texts because information visualization is the field in which I currently (or at least prospectively) reside. While I accept that information visualization art certainly may be examined from a socio-political context (as Sack suggests) and that information visualization may evince poetically arbitrary decisions on the part of the creator (as Manovich maintains), the assertion that one or the other should be inherent to the creative and critical process of the work remains unjustified. Either position could conceivably be argued for virtually any work, which makes the discussion an exercise in frustration.

Reading Response - Sack/Manovich

While both authors seek to explain the attempt of artists to investigate the proliferation of data and networking streams in todays current atmosphere, each has a slightly different approach as to how to analyze the motivation of such material. Both authors attempt to discern the strategies involved in computers visualizing large data sets and "computer programs to render data as images" Manovich takes a more literal deconstruction of how data visualization is performed/considered while Sack (with the benefit in the form of response) takes a pseudo cultural and historical investigation into data visualization.

Manovich makes the argument that data visualization is the opposite of the sublime, that is the optimized essence of what an entity is, a representation no more pure. Through strategies he terms "anti-sublime" artist dealing with the deluge of information try to give form to an incomprehensible mist, to map such phenomena into a representation whose scale is comparable to the scales of human perception and cognition.

Sack attempts to contend this stance through the citation of John Simon's Every Icon (1998) and Kant's notion of the sublime. Sack posits that this work is not a tool for understanding, but rather a mystification of an existential concept. I truly believe that both are addressing a concern from two different camps. One believes that to take a chaotic material and form it into a translation is the goal of the data visualizer. However is this project a tool or "an attempt at an aesthetic of the sublime." Both arguments could be made.

Personally I side with it is a literal tool for understanding the idea of number systems, probability, etc. For without physically written equations we could not represent the notions of certain mathematics. This project is organization in terms of order and comparison. As the counter moves up you can see the change in time as represented by the pixels, a demarcation. However when considering the system a feeling of infinity (or at least a time beyond the scale of self) becomes apparent. It is physically showing you the data in form.

I think Sack may just be beating a dead horse in response to Manovich's paper. He states in his analysis, "when you look at artistic projects that map out and visualize information, do not worry so much about whether they are pretty, beautiful…I ask that we shift our attention away from visual aesthetics and focus, instead, on an aesthetics of governance." I believe this was already address inherently (in so few words) in the Manovich article. The representation of data, when properly executed (he cites Liberskind's Jewish Mueseum as a failure) the subject matter of agency, power structures, social systems, are revealed. I think Sack is trying to reverse engineer what Manovich is discussing, that the interception of an artist in a data set and creating form, will reveal revelations of the status quo (artist can show the cracks and connections).

I found Manovich's citation and discussion of the work "Index 01" to be quite keen. His discussed an analog form of content-related connectedness and then relates it to the socio-digital venue of Flickr, Facebook, Google, that we are so akin to now. I believe he saw the trend (before it was apparent) that data as what is now called "Meta-data" can create a web of relations that bolster the entities it is connected to (i.e. this paper on suburbanism in post WWII informs me when I look at photographs of urban segregationist).
see http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html

Sack and Manovich (week 5)

Wow... Warren Sack... what an excellent bibliography used so, so poorly.  The goal is noble - to enter data visualization into the art historical and philosophical discourse by asking why and how it is executed.

Throughout the text, Sack gives no useable definition for aesthetics, except to misuse Terry Eagleton's own definition to jump to the conclusion that aesthetics is first and foremost from the body - that is, instead of recognizing it as embodied (a claim set forth by many theorists, including Eagleton himself, Mark Hansen, N. Katherine Hayles, etc.).  Conflating emotional reaction with physiological reaction confuses his description of Freud's uncanny, and muddies his argument.  Why argue that the uncanny is at play here, rather than describe the movement towards self-discipline evident in Foucault's discourse?  Is the "fear" we feel from "Carnivore" that of the doppleganger, or of the mechanisms of control put into play since the 16th and 17th centuries?

What's more, creating a divide between visual and conceptual art is ridiculous and completely arbitrary.  Describing an aesthetics of bureaucracy or governance is ignoring the repeated Frankfurt School claim that "all art is political" (a view shared by Sol LeWitt and the majority of late 20th century artists and theorists).  Buchloh's description of the change in art toward "an aesthetics of administration" is not to define a new form of art, but rather to describe the artist's role in a postmodern commodity capitalist society.  The artist reflects his/her culture, not the other way around.

Other sources, such as Turing’s “On Computable Numbers” and especially Hobbes’ Leviathon, are used completely out of context, and perhaps throw-away quotes that seem to add to the argument only if the reader is not paying proper attention.  The idea of the “collective body” does play into the central argument of Hobbes, but the point is far better served by Foucault, who clearly outlines the movement from mass, to individual, to cybernetic body.  The use of Turing seems simply a loose thread, as the structure of the computer and its metaphorical relationship to bureaucracy is unnecessary and confusing.

Manovich makes similar - and possibly more egregious - mistakes in his text "The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art."  His claim - that data visualization (or dynamic data visualization?) is not considered sublime, but anti-sublime in that it is about clarifying and instructing rather than obscuring or awing - is easily understood, but horribly explained.  For example, his claim that "dynamic data visualization" is a new cultural form "enabled by computing" (1) is never explained, and one is left wondering if "dynamic" refers to an interactive element (which certainly changes the argument) or a kinetic/changing visualization.

Making a distinction between "visualization" and "mapping" is certainly important, though I feel that Manovich misses his chance to emphasize this difference in terms of historical and theoretical discourse.  (Side note:  Sachs points out that "mapping" has a geographical connotation, but quickly follows toward the discussion of aesthetics and its relationship to the body rather than describing geography as simply another larger, but strikingly similar body... a parallel missed opportunity.)  How is “mapping” the more generic term, especially when taking into consideration the breadth of visualizations that use various data and transform them into virtual landscapes?  I can’t help but feel that there is an important link to be forged between the idea of landscape - especially bringing along with it the entire art historical lineage of the landscape - and the field of data visualization.  If we claim that it is a “field” of discourse - once again, a geographical metaphor describing a physical plane of existence - why aren’t we taking advantage of all the cybernetic-related discourse possibilities it offers?

Benjamin Keddy Response

Response Paper: Aesthetics of Information Visualization

In this article Warren Sack analyzes the origins of “Information Visualization” as a term that developed out of utility— a pragmatic development in the scientific and engineering communities to make data more palpable by applying a means to visually analyze statistical values. Beyond this initial introduction, Sack’s writing responds to Lev Manovich’s critical essay entitled The Anti-Sublime Ideal of Data Art. With Manovich focusing on defining the recently cultivated term “Anti-Sublime” relative to the Information Visualization genre of art, Sack views Manovich’s exemplification of specific data born artwork as Anti-Sublime to be flawed. Moreover, he views Manovich’s focus on the concept of sublime vs. Anti-Sublime to be of little relevance to the meaning of the work produced by practitioners in the “InfoViz” genre. Instead, he believes the work should aspire to define itself relative to what he refers to as theaesthetics of governance— thus taking part in a greater discourse as part of, and commenting on, the exponent of the “body politic”. Although Sack seems to give him little credit for his late evolving criticism, Manovich does eventually question the meaning of this developing artform relative to social identity.

Responding to Manovich’s definition of Anti-Sublime as a form of reductionism, Sack counters by pointing to a contradictory definition of the contextually relevant, mathematically “sublime” offered by Kant.

“Sublime is the name given to what is absolutely great” “…that is sublime in comparison with which all else is small.” (Kant, 1790, para. 25)

The grandiose conceptual complexity embraced by artwork such as John Simon’s Every Icon serves to support the Kantian assertion. Sack alludes to the mathematical density of the piece noting that its representational evolution occurs over “billions of years”, continuing “This does not reduce the (almost) infinite to the easily appreciable finite: it is, I argue, an attempt at an aesthetic of the sublime, not the anti-sublime.”

To illuminate the issue of meaning relative to Manovich’s primary viewpoint, Sack rhetorically questions why data should be mapped and analyzed in the relationship of information to aesthetics, and later explains how mapping acquires a greater significance through its relationship to the social condition, its resulting networks and all of the individual components this comprises rather than through its obvious association to territorial distinction. He seems not to directly acknowledge Manovich's later comments in which the author concludes

"For me, the real challenge of data art is not about how to map some abstract and impersonal data into something meaningful and beautiful – economists, graphic designers, and scientists are already doing this quite well. The more interesting and at the end maybe more important challenge is how to represent the personal subjective experience of a person living in a data society."

In a comment on the Information Visualization movement, Sack refers to aesthetics as a “form of judgment – that focuses on the senses”. He acknowledges this judgment as “quite different from that usually applied in the domains of science and engineering to understand the worth of an information visualization”. As this assertion highlights the value of such visualization as a tool of technical practice, it nods to a problematic relationship between the terms information and aesthetics in the context of defining an artistic genre.

As Sack rejects the term “Anti-Sublime” as a defining aspiration of this genre, I too believe that the in the context of referencing an artistic mode of production, terms such as “sublime” lack meaning. As it refers to a greatness that lies beyond all comprehension, its opposite is equally incomprehensible in a discussion of artistic form— and thus is of little value as a descriptive reference. Although it could be applied in reference to ultimate forms of abstraction, I feel it is too heavily loaded with mythic idealism to be of much practical value in critical discussion.

Since my initial exposure to the term “Information Visualization” I have also taken exception to the rather limited scope of production that the definition implies. It seems that information that is represented through sonification (for example) rather than visualization is it then excluded from this association. For this reason, I appreciate Sack’s affinity for the more generally accepting reference of “conceptual art”-- an alternative to the prescriptive definition of “visual art” as a means to more effectively referr to the work of artists such as Andrea Polli (http://earroom.wordpress.com/tag/sonification/ ) who gathers data relative to global interconnectivity, climate, atmospheric studies, and weather, transposing into them into artwork that is most often represented sonically.

To provide greater specificity to his position relative to the issue of artistic definition, Sack places his argument into a political discourse, stating “The larger role for artists is best considered using the historical precedents of conceptual art. Specifically, one must consider how conceptual art has reiterated the modes of industrial production and bureaucracy in order to engage, decode and critique them.” He emphasizes this with a reference to the position taken by Buchloh in his rebuttal to Lewitt’s description of the conceptual artist a “cataloguing clerk”, commenting on the shift to conceptual arts in post-war area as

“...an effort to place its autocritical investigations at the service of liquidating even the last remnants of traditional aesthetic experience”. (Buchloh, 1990)

As Sack promotes the concept that the “information visualizers” might best be served by occupying themselves with exploring governance issues of the “body politic”, his position strikes me as promoting all that pertains to the individual, collective condition society, and all the relative networks that sustain the “things” that Latour’s Parliament references. He also invokes Foucault’s perspective on the governmental territory relative to the concept of mapping within the InfoViz genre emphasizing a Foucault’s reflection on La Perrière’s, “object of government” as “a sort of complex composed of men and things”.

It is important to conclude that while Sack seems preoccupied with Manovich's tangential focus on the Anti-Sublime, he does not highlight that he and Manovich eventually arrive at rather similar positions relative to the role that the social body "should" play in augmenting the conceptual discourse of such creative media. Sack explores this in greater depth throughout his text, while Manovich obviously takes quite a while to arrive at this point and seems not entirely confident in his position. Although I consider my own perspective on the Information Visualization movement to be more similar to that of Sack’s than of Manovich, I wonder then, what is Sack not including in this seemingly limitless association to “things” of humanity? Is his (and Latour’s) perspective so inclusive that it becomes dilute of meaning? Because he speaks to what one might call would call a “specificity in ubiquity” I think not. Although the net is cast so wide that it touches the human condition and all its tributaries, his distinction includes the caveat of requiring a coherent representation of how we arrive at meaning, bringing to question how astute that observation of meaning is relative to our social identity and how this is connected to those elements that determine such identity.

The Anti-Sublime of Data Art

As I explained in my response to Sack’s article, I don’t feel that the polarized discussion of the Sublime vs. Anti-Sublime is productive in the discourse of the meaning of such work. Although I do appreciate Sack’s counter commentary of Manovich’s focus on characterizing the nature of the Anti-Sublime in the context of the Information Visualization art genre, I feel he overtly legitimizes the discussion by entertaining Manovich’s examples of this ideological premise to the extent that he has.

While The Sublime seems to be the criterion by which art is often measured, I don’t believe that it should be. In the artistic context, the term alludes to an existential enlightenment that transcends explanation, immersing the audience in an illumination to which all else pales. How often does such an experience happen— often enough to make it relevant? Could I describe the discoveries of my youth that included the life-changing exposure to Steve Reich, My Bloody Valentine, Charles Mingus, David Lynch, and Tim Hawkinson to be sublime experiences? I certainly recall feeling that I had reached unique points in my creative enlightenment upon experiencing these artists for the first time. However, since no one but me can experience these personal introductions in the way that I have, I feel that referring to them as sublime examples of creative expression has little relevance to critical discussion of the meaning in their work.

I find it is further problematic that while Manovich thoroughly entertains the notion of the sublime versus anti-sublime, he emphasizes the utilitarian aspects of data representation in art as a “fruitful research direction”, noting:

“the media object can be manipulated using all standard interface techniques: search, filter, zoom, multiple views, summarize, etc. More complex and unusual mappings are also possible – and the search for such new mappings that allow us to access old media objects in new ways congruent with information interfaces we use in our everyday life – represents one of the most fruitful research directions in new media art”.

Does the “direction” of applying new mapping techniques old media in new media art become fruitful because of the new breed of everyday tools we have at our disposal? Perhaps it is elements of the “unique” or “complex” that he refers to indicate such salience— two adjectives that I see as in opposition to his definition of the Anti-Sublime with its premise of reduction.

He again discusses the “importance” of mapping relative to Natalie Jeremijenko’s work entitled “live wire” in the section of the text entitled Data Modernism.

“Data Mapping one data set into another, or one media into another, is one of the most common operations in computer culture, and it is also common in new mediaart. Probably the earliest mapping project which received lots of attention and which lies at the intersection of science and art (because it seems to function well in both contexts) was Natalie Jeremijenko’s “live wire.” Working in Xerox PARC in the early 1990s, Jeremijenko created a functional wire sculpture which reacts in real time to network behavior: more traffic causes the wire to vibrate more strongly. In the last few years, data mapping has emerged as one of the most important and interesting areas in new media art, attracting the energy of some of the best people in the field.”

Jeremijenko’s piece may be terrific. I have never experienced it. However, Manovich’s description of the work is not compelling and portrays the piece as lacking in dimension.

Illustrating this point, the following is a quote about the piece from the Walker Art Center’s Website http://tech90s.walkerart.org/nj/transcript/nj_04.html

“Live Wire could be another graph on your computer screen, a real-time 3D rendering of network traffic, something else in your face, in, to quote Perry Hoberman, the monogamous relationship of the user to the screen. But instead it is in the periphery, in the shared physical space. Live Wire is tacit information?"

So you have visualized data traffic using a wire that moves. People can now visualize information about the load on your network by looking at the rapid movement of the physical object rather than using an a CRT monitor for a change. Great. What does this mean? How is this different than a science project?

Although I can agree that “Jebratt’s 1:1 reduces the cyberspace – usually imagined as vast and maybe even infinite – to a single image that fits within the browser frame”, does the mere presentation of a complex data set within a single frame signal that this work aspires to be the inverse of the Sublime? This strikes me as a quite simplistic assertion. This is a “data set” (however increasing that set may be) that, although represented in a single frame, is concerned with an informational expansiveness that is referenced and accessed by the interface itself.

Eventually, as noted in the previous response paper, Manovich arrives at directly critiquing the ubiquitous mapping that seems to define much of contemporary Information visualization but does not get there until page twelve, stating “By allowing us to map anything into anything else, to construct infinite number of different interfaces to a media object, to follow infinite trajectories through the object, and so on, computer media simultaneously makes all these choices appear arbitrary”.

I agree that these choices often seem arbitrary, even at times seeming to be the result of following a “how-to” or a “data visualization by numbers” guide. I view this as quite problematic in scope of producing work of depth that is constructed on genuine interests and concerns and is central to my own ambivalence about much of what is being developed out of the information visualization mode of production. My stumbling across this website seemed quite apropos to the discussion at hand: http://book.flowingdata.com/

Considering that his entire article is dedicated to a commentary of data art, I find it ironic that Manovich’s prime example of “problematic mapping” is Daniel Liberskind’s design of Jewish Museum in Berlin— an architectural work. has somehow decided that using the example of something that he is unsure about the motivation behind will help make his point more resonant. He seems to mandate a transparency of motivation to justify its construction— a notion I find to be rather absurd. He notes “as far as I know, he does not tell us anything about why he projected the net in this way as opposed to any other way.” As a side note— out of curiosity, I also looked into the the mapping element has played a role in the buildings construction and found an reasonable explanation quite easy to find on Liberskind’s website. In all fairness, he could have posted the explanation after reading Manovich’s criticism.

In addition to presenting a perspective that I find to be a bit underdeveloped, he exposes what I view is one the greatest problems of Information Visualization artwork— the need for explanation. How do you transform the meaning of the interface to someone who does not have the technical vocabulary to understand what he or she is being presented with? Is the artist then excluding those individuals from the intended audience? That is possible. But then what does this say about the art that is produced and about the artist producing it? It seems that more often the artist wishes to include the audience by quickly educating them about the medium and concept so that they have the baseline knowledge necessary to interpret the work and its meaning. This is especially true relative to an artist such as Jeremijenko (as in the case of her tadpole walker piece: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/02/treehugger_radio-natalie-jeremijenko-1.php

Her work, as seems the case with much of the new media / activist art I have been exposed to, beckons a question and quickly offers the answer (as a means of motivating an ideological movement of some sort). While I think this is an important element of activism, I find it problematic to new media art due to its affect of limiting the scope of interpretation of the work. It essentially tells them what they should be getting out of the work. In an interview featured on treehugger.com Jeremijenko explains:

“…we have a tadpole walker, so that you can take it out walking in the evening, which of course, makes your neighbors ask you what the hell you're doing. Then you would explain why you're raising a tadpole in this water sample, and that you have concerns about it, and they would probably share the same concerns.”

Manovich finally concludes that “data-subjectivity” is what is needed to provide greater depth to this work. Although he dances around less-important issues for much of his article, in his final paragraph he ends up in a place where he and I largely agree— that “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”.

Sack & Manovich Responses-Jon Chambers

Aesthetics of Information Visualization- Sack

Sack starts out by critiquing Manovich’s anti-sublime theory of data visualization, by basically saying visualizations can encompass many characteristics, and proceeds onto more pressing issues regarding these visualizations. He says that the anti-sublime is a small corner of visualization and that “…a better way to understand artistic contributions in this area is to use the ideas and methods of conceptual art rather than those of the visual arts.” (p. 4) These conceptual artists were struggling with the “…methods, means, and materials of that form of political and social production that we call bureaucracy.” (p.6) He gets all political by explaining how the computer interface uses bureaucratic forms, i.e. files, folders, etc. and that his argument is this:

“…when you look at artistic projects that map out and visualize information, do not worry so much about whether they are pretty, beautiful, friendly or easy to use. Instead interrogate them by asking what sorts of governance they support or reflect: Are they democratic or bureaucratic? (p.8)

         We need to know, or should try to understand, why scientists, governments and artists are making these visualizations, as the body is implicated within them. How is the body treated in a visualization? I think that this is an important thing to think about when analyzing visualizations, as this data has a direct connection to the body’s place and activity. He pushes this concept even further and talks about bodies of information: “Information visualization is an attempt to index and articulate these bodies which -- despite the often-asserted idea that digitally-stored information can be infinitely reproduced -- are constantly at risk due to disk crashes, miniaturization, noisy networks, and, in general, disappearance.”(p.13) A poetic dematerialization of the body happens, and this body doesn’t exist except in the virtual realm, as well as the “disappearance” of the physical body, or the homunculus. I think the most important part of this article comes towards the end, when he talks about the politics of the body and virtual body, and how this can create a paranoid state of surveillance. The project East African Cities gives the person with no voice a voice, but it also categorizes and defines demographics within a space, something that the power structure can potentially use. This space can also be used the opposite way, as he uses examples of “social software”, where people can organize “smart mobs”. These types of software are basically cellphone connections, or online communities that can instantly get together to protest, and don’t really create visualizations. There were a lot of ideas in this article, but Sack never really came to any solid stances about the way data visualizations should be used, but rather talks about their implications. He does come up with the vague conclusion:

 “As a part of a larger Body Politic in a democratic society we need to see ourselves and our imagined communities (Anderson, 1983) within our larger political and cultural contexts.” (p. 19)

Sure, I agree, but how do data visualizations really enable us to do this?  

The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art- Manovich

In this article, Manovich has investigated artistic visualizations that are created from data mapping. He goes through a historical account of how new technologies, specifically the computer, engage with older technologies, i.e. film, photography and coins the term “metamedia” by saying, “It is also appropriate (and more interesting) to use the term mapping for describing what new media does to old media. Software allows us to re-map old media objects into new structures – thus turning media into what I call ‘metamedia’.” (p. 3) Also that a meta-media object, “contains both language and meta-language – both the original media structure (a film, an architectural space, a sound track) and the software tools that allow the user to generate descriptions of this structure and to change this structure.” (p. 5) The software is what makes information into something new, and the computer is able to help artists interpret older media into something new. So, then, in this technologically driven world, how do artists map all of this data into something meaningful by using meta-data objects and software? He goes on to list a few projects and questions why he is so moved by the end results, “Is it because they carry the promise of rendering the phenomena that are beyond the scale of human senses into something that is within our reach, something visible and tangible?” (p. 11)  

After this reflection, Manovich moves to say that this is the opposite of what the Romantic artists tried to accomplish with the sublime, because these data mapping results create the tangible out of the intangible; creating something within the abilities of human perception. This seems like a prophetic insight, but the end result doesn’t have to be so analytical and if one attempts to make something sublime, the end result has to be somewhat tangible. If the artist wanted to map data to swaths of color fields, could this not be sublime? The Romantics may have been trying to capture the unrecordable (emotional response), but they still ended up with a painting (tangible). I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as what he makes it out to be.

One of the best parts of the essay is when he talks about the arbitrary choices that artists use to map data to something visual. “Another important question worth posing is about arbitrary versus motivated choices in mapping. Since computers allow us to easily map any data set into another set, I often wonder why did the artist choose this or that mapping when endless other choices were also possible.” (p.12) That is a good question. Not only are other choices possible, but perhaps infinite choices are possible. Ben Fry’s visualizations are more one to one representations that make sense and are, one could say, sublime, but the epitomization of invisible data into a representation could be impossible. The questions does remain though, why do we even need to visualize all of this data, and is it important?

 

Responses: Manovich/Sack - Chaz

In these two pieces, "The Anti-Sublime Idea in Data Art" by Manovich and "Aesthetics of Information Visualization" by Sack, the two authors form a debate on how data visualization relates to the art historical sublime, but also move past this topic to land on critical perspectives with which to better evaluate data visualization as an artistic medium.

Manovich begins by establishing the importance and newness of datavis as an artistic genre. To establish this he frames all software art as a "meta-medium" which can map any medium, or dimension to any other medium or dimension. This also reflects what Manovich describes as a postmodern, globalized moment of "remix" In short, he states that data visualization has the ideal goal of making everything representable, which he claims is the opposite of the romantic sublime, also a new kind of inverse modernist abstraction. But, after he establish this theme within datavis, he contradicts it (and possibly himself) by challenging his own claim. He says making all data representable leaves an arbitrary gap between the data and how the artist has chosen to represent it. He ends the piece advocating for the datavis artist to embrace this arbitrary/indeterminate aspect of the practice similar to how the surrealists might. Essentially Manovich ends by pointing to the contingent strategies of how data is creatively handled.

On the other hand, Sack says he disagrees with Manovich stating that while some datavis might follow the anti-sublime, other works of datavis does not. Instead, he walks the reader through a circuitous route through Kant, Freud, and Sol Lewitt to say that what is most important to evaluate in datavis is an "aeshetics of governance." In other words what is most important is this think about whose interests are served in the work of data vis, or to rephrase again: to evaluate the contingent strategies of how data is creatively handled.

Its difficult to respond to a debate of datavis' relationship to sublime in an evaluative way when neither party involved in the debate establish a stable definition of sublime to work from in the first place. Once both authors have worked past their brief pass at the concept of sublime, they both end up in very similar places, which I don't think disagree with each other more than they agree. This all amounts to good points, which are potentially lost in a unorganized debate of loose prose.

To give an in depth example I'd like to analyze the prose in a particular paragraph in the Sack piece. I don't mean to pick on Sack, but in general I think his prose has more problems, so consider the following paragraph:

"A broad enough aesthetics would have to address not only the psychological states discussed by Kant and Freud, but also the social and political implications of information visualization. If the aesthetics of information visualization are not just anti-sublime, sublime or uncanny, then what exactly are these aesthetics? I will argue that -- in order to understand artistic information visualization – it is best to explore beyond Kantian and Freudian aesthetics of visual perception. My argument will be counter-intuitive because if, indeed, artistic practices have something to contribute to information visualization, then -- given the term "visualization" – how could the artistic contribution come from anything other than the visual arts? I will argue that a better way to understand artistic contributions in this area is to use the ideas and methods of conceptual art rather than those of the visual arts." (4)

By the time we have reached the first sentence the case of Freud and Kant as the theoretical base for datavis hasn't been made by anyone but the author. While the social and political implications on datavis could of course be of importance, they are not the absent extension of Kant and Freud, nor are the antonymic of the two figures, so their importance in this sentence has not been established. Furthermore, no case is made to not think beyond Kant and Freud, so a second straw man regarding Kant and Frued is inserted in the third sentence. Then the theory of Kant and Freud is conflated with "the visual arts" in general. He does this by placing his argument in opposition to Kant and Freud (which is not necessarily the case), and then replaces Kant and Frued with "the visual arts." Although they are surely important figures in art discourse, to claim they exhaust the entire field of "the visual arts" is surely a strech. Then there is an assumption that conceptual art is somehow not within the domain of visual art, or is somehow opposition to that category when this is also unqualified, and generally not accepted to be true. To support this statement I would challenge anyone to find a work of art which does not involve a sensory component. Even the absense of vision or sound still stands in as a representation, perceived through the human sensorium, therefore conceptual art, even while ostensibly lacking visual component still belongs to a larger category of visual art.

I would guess that these articles are intended for two particular audiences 1) artists incorporating datavis into their practice and 2) those involved in discussion of art crticism and art history. I make the assumption of the latter on the fact that many direct art historical references are made, making the articles appear as advocacies for those outisde of a new media disciplinary framework consider the importance of data-driven art into art history in general. Because of unqualified appeals to art history, and problems in the construction of argument I think both works fail to succeed in this larger goal, even while the both come up to very well taken points on how to evaluate datavis for the emerging datavis artist. In this sense the first audience is probably taken care of, as their scrutiny of art historical reference may be more forgiving. But if scholarship on data art is always like this I don't think there would be any huge mystery as to why data visualization is not taken seriously by a larger international contemporary art conversation. Thankfully, this is not case. First, I will fully fess up to the fact that I am pressing hard on texts that date to the earlier portion of the 2000's and my critiqe comes with the advantage of more historical time. But furthermore other figures really have their prose locked down when approaching the topic of new media's discourse being integrated into art discourse at large. Edward Shanken for example, in nothing more than a blog post, recently summed up the cultural gap between new media and international contemporary art in a post initially written by Paddy Johnson in artfagcity.com:

http://www.artfagcity.com/2011/09/06/edward-a-shanken-on-is-new-media-accepted-in-the-art-world/

Although it doesn't touch on datavis in particular, its a fantastic little piece which really comes to the table with its prose locked down, even while being published in the modest context of a blog post and still reflecting the potential biases of the author. Its well worth a read.