Data Embodiment: beyond the visual, back to the world
Originally published at https://medium.com/the-visual-agency/data-embodiment-beyond-the-visual-back-to-the-world-8001aefb3e9 on June 7th, 2023 in The Visual Agency Editorial by Paolo Ciuccarelli, Founding Director of the Center for Design at Northeastern.
Like the separation of disciplines, in a growing interdisciplinary research arena, the separation between our senses when we get to represent the data of complex social and natural phenomena especially, appears to be reductive, and unable to convey the whole of it. We experience the world around us — and make sense of it — through all our senses, with our whole body, why aren’t we approaching the representation of data with a similar, holistic, multisensorial, approach? What is the value in integrating visualization and sonification, sonification and physicalization, data performances and visualization, or all of them together — if any? A panel of colleagues from Northeastern University and metaLAB Harvard, discussed these topics during the Design Research Week at the Center for Design.
I addressed similar questions in a previous post — The Physical Life of Data — so I’ll focus less on the materiality of data and its representation — which, by the way, is still not discussed enough — and more on a few interesting concepts that emerged from panelists’ contributions and the discussion that followed. For the sake of time (of the readers), I divided the article in three parts: In this issue I reflect on Lins Derry’s work about data choreographies; the next two parts — Visual Rhetoric and Autographic Representations — will be published in the next issues of both The Visual Agency and the Center for Design’s newsletters.
Part 1: Data Kinesthetics
Fig 1: Data Sensorium choreographic process, Lins Derry
I met Lins Derry when I joined metaLAB Harvard, where she’s principal; as described in their website, Lins’ work looks at how choreography models can be applied to different design processes, in HCI especially through the concept of choreographic interfaces: “the body is often her site for investigation and intervention in the realms of design and performance”. The focus on data representations comes from realizing how the choreographer’s process of organizing bodies in space resembles the one of visualizing data on screen or paper, the layout part especially. This is how the idea of choreographing a dataset started, not surprisingly, perhaps: wasn’t spatialization — position — at the core of Bertin’s visual variables framework?
Lins’ approach to data representation translates into a specific, unique, interpretation of Data Embodiment, presented during the panel as “A communicative and artistic method that approaches the body as a choreographic medium to physicalize and perform abstract data”.
A method discussed in her (almost) homonymous paper, that is more about how data is expressed (by the author) and less about how data is experienced (by the reader). I like to see this definition as a further acknowledgement of abstraction in most current data visualization languages as a potential issue, and a claim for the need of getting ‘back to earth’ by centering the work around data on human beings and their physical bodies. Lins also refers to her approach as Data Kinesthetics: “Moving abstract data off the page and into the world of bodies”.
Fig. 2: 100% City, Rimini Protokoll
One of the first, straightforward, examples of choreographing data is the “100% City” project, by Rimini Protokoll [Fig 2]: A “Computer augmented human data embodiment” project driven by a simple, repetitive, movement, me/not me, like yes and no, by which people, citizens, position themselves on 100 square meters of stage, according to different questions. The project shows — as Jörn Hurtienne points out — how data choreographies are naturally able to enrich the ‘headcounts’, especially when it’s about demographic data: the identities and attributes of performers are always co-present, and naturally add to the representation of data through their gender, age and other traits. Data choreographies can also be seen as data sources, by tracking for example the movement of actors on stage, and can be translated in turn through other modalities, like data visualization — as in the interactive network of Dunham Company Repertory / Dunham’s data project — or data sonification, for which I couldn’t find yet compelling examples: an area for future work, perhaps.
Lins’ current own project — “Data Sensorium“ [Fig 1] — is based on data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and aims at raising awareness on the phenomenon of climate migrations, as a consequence of a warmer planet. It’s a direct translation of bodily movements, an intimate, dramatic connection between migratory bodies and the dancing bodies. The project integrates two different modalities: disasters and hazards are mapped into gestures and colors, to show the frequency of extreme events, while a dashboard projected on a wall during the performance visually represents data about displacement of migrants over time. The use of a logarithmic scale compensated for the gap between the amplitude of the gestures and the magnitude of migration.
The idea of data choreographies made me reflect on how much the relation between our body and the world around us is shaped by data and information: data moves us by directing our decisions about how we travel in time and space, how we perform in the stage of the everyday, a-critically pulled around by the prosthesis of our wearable and mobile devices especially, creating un-voluntary yet orchestrated choreographies and performances. In turn, those everyday performances are often tracked and monitored, feeding back the surveillant algorithm with the data we produce. We might all benefit from being more intentional in embodying data and granting the authorization to those directing our performances.
Fig 3: Data Murals, Data Culture Group, Northeastern University.
If you want to know more about (Data) Embodiment practices, the College of Arts Media and Design at Northeastern University is one of the main players on stage, with several active research groups and scholars, and a strong focus on public engagement: Ilya Vidrin with “Embodied Creativity” explores the broader relationship between body movements, empathy and (somatic) knowledge — see the “Designing Dance: Embodiment, Experience, and Ephemerality” conversation at the Center for Design to learn more about his work; Dani Snyder-Young with her “Community Engaged Data Theatre” studies the impact of theater on its audience and how it can be used to intervene on racism; The Data Culture Group led by Rahul Bhargava and Laura Perovich builds on theater, dance and a feminist approach to data, to engage with local communities and challenge power in data processes, through physical installations and collective performances [fig.3].
Is there a way to ground data representations on the humane, bodily experience of the world without necessarily going physical or performing data in space? Visual metaphors and rhetoric might serve the purpose, stay tuned for the next episode to learn how.
