Experimental Data Aesthetics
I’ve recently had the pleasure to start working with Shintaro Miyazaki on the Experimental Data Aesthetics project. This is part of The Critical Media Lab, an integral part of the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW in Basel.
The challenge to represent big amounts of high-dimensional data in a way, that researchers can recognize and explore them productively appears to be an immanent design problem. Therefore, we are interested in the sensual extension of visual representation by acoustic means and the question, whether the “visual work” of the researcher and the “calculating work” of the computer can be complemented by “sonic work” to find novel solutions to the problems of representation.
Experimental aesthetics is a formal field of psychology: it tests the efficacy of modes of representation. In recent years it is gaining interest in different fields such as design, art and the humanities.
I’m building several applications for exploring higher dimensional datasets through various methods of visualization and sonification. These will be free, the source code is open source and some of the libraries used are being further developed through this project which should be helpful for other researchers and artists building similar projects.
In some cases we are attempting to find ways to meaningfully represent the structure of data; useful tools for productive research.
In other cases we are exploring the tools and techniques with an artistic sensibility, open to any new aesthetics pleasures that we might discover.
Artistic discoveries often make their way into design aesthetics, and the established principals of design are often used in art. Art also has permission to abuse those rules and to negate meaning and clarity.
I’ll be writing here about both sides of the coin.
The project has “Experimental” right in the title, so we are free to explore and discover things that we probably wouldn’t if we were cranking out business intelligence reports or trying to optimize user interactions — the usual dull, practical productive applications that unfortunately I’ve done too much of these last few years.
Personally I’ve been thinking and talking about making data art for many years but haven’t had the chance to really start work on it. So for me, this is a perfect opportunity to thoroughly learn machine learning and the principals of representation and to develop tools and techniques that can be further used and abused by my art.
PlaySPLOM
https://github.com/experimentalDataAesthetics/PlaySPLOM
This is an app to interactively explore multivariate datasets with sound and vision with a Scatterplot Matrix.
It was first implemented as a sketch in Processing and SuperCollider. I then rebuilt it as a C++ openFrameworks application.
I quite enjoy writing C++11. After many years of untyped languages its such a nice feeling of security to see compile errors instead of tedious runtime debugging.
But after careful consideration I think we are going to switch this to an Electron app using supercollider.js.
Its cross platform and has zillions of usable JavaScript libraries available for interface design and styling. In particular I like d3.js for graphing and interactive controls. Writing these things in C++ takes a lot more time.
Models of Segregation
https://github.com/experimentalDataAesthetics/models-of-self-organization
Visualization and Sonification of Computational Models of Self-Organization with Electron, d3 and supercollider.js.
This app is a gallery or portfolio of computational models. Its an exploration of historically interesting computational models of self-organization.
Currently there are two models: Russ Ashby’s Homeostat and Schelling’s Spatial Segregation model.
We will develop this further, adding more models and more interface.
http://www.ixdm.ch/portfolio/experimental-data-aesthetics/
https://github.com/experimentalDataAesthetics
