Visualizing from the rhizome
A research through/by design experiment
After a long week of work, the group of friends and colleagues gathers to sit in a circle in the common room. After a few minutes of reflective meditation, they take a moment to reflect on their experiences and type them into a single phone that they pass around one by one. As their responses are submitted via the phone, a projector screen is populated with information. The data takes the form of a throng of trees, growing together as if they are in an old growth forest. Each participant is represented by an individual tree, and the roots of each tree connect — a potential of the conversation they’ve decided to have.
This is part of a thesis on collaborative, synchronous data visualization rituals as a prosthetic for community and ecological belonging. Read more about the project here.
What can be learned about creating data visualizations from a view that all knowledge is situated in bodies? In living, we form near-infinite connections with other organisms, the traces of which manifest in all that we think, see, do , and embody. How can we we begin design data visualizations that make these abstract, tacit connections explicit, even making a sense of belonging possible?
In this project, I aim to experiment with designing data visualizations whilst embracing both Object Oriented Ontology (as defined by Timothy Morton and Graham Harman) and the rhizome, a model of information (as defined by Guattari and Deluze in A Thousand Plateaus). Together, these two theories inform a way of situating data visualizations as incomplete “tracings” of the realities they reflect, yet provide a way forward (through framing and ecological metaphor) for situating visualizations as tools to understand complex relationships within these realities.
What follows is a summary of the relevant points from these works, how they inform way of designing data visualizations, and the experiment to test how these theories can be manifested through the tree metaphor I’m using in my thesis.
“But the most important lesson of all, for me, has been how history embeds in every living thing. The land speaks to me of a much longer time frame than the one my body understands.” — Malikia Cyril, poet and media activist
The epistemological assumptions
In this project, I take the philosophical view of object-oriented ontology (OOO), first articulated by Graham Harman, that holds that there is no way to access anything, or object, in its entirety; we can only observe the phenomena they emit [1]. For example, we can understand a cup through measuring it, or drinking from it, but we will never grasp the entirety of the cup, the gesamtkunst-cup [1].
I’ve been reading the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus by Deluze and Guattari, Rhizome. Their concept of rhizome provides a way to frame knowledge and data as a heterogeneous, non-hierarchical, non-linear process of assemblages.
Together, these readings provide a theoretical foundation for designing for plurality through the idea that knowledge is situated/assembled. That is, this project assumes plural futures are only possible through this view of knowledge.
The epistemological commitments
An OOO view has at least two epistemological implications in this project:
I. A shift away from anthropocentric way of knowing towards an ecological one. As Timothy Morton writes, “…it doesn’t make thinking, in particular human thinking, into a special kind of access mode that truly gets at what a thing is” [1].
II. The kind of phenomena we can observe is bounded by the bodies we have. Indeed, a human will experience an apple differently than the tree that produced it or the microorganisms that will decompose it.
Deluze and Guattari’s characterization of rhizome has several implications:
I. Connectedness. Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything else (and this possibility of connection must exist) [2].
II. Heterogeneousness. No universals exist, only “throngs of reality.” We can only understand things through de-centering these throngs through other registers [2].
III. Multiplicity. A complex structure that doesn’t reference a prior unity [2].The aspects of the rhizome are not manifold expressions of a single concept or transcendent unity. They aren’t part of a whole that has been fragmented. Instead of “the whole is less than the sum of the parts,” the whole doesn’t exist.
IV. Asignifying rupture. When the rhizome is broken, it will grow again on old lines or new ones [2]. Even if most of the structure is broken, it will nevertheless rebound.
V. Cartography. To gesture to the rhizome, we should use the model of a map (a construction), and not a tracing (reproduction) of reality [2]. Maps provide an open, connectable way forward with multiple entryways into the mix.
VI. Decalomania (decals). Despite tracings being defined as closed in reproductions, they are still useful [2]. They should always be situated within the map. Indeed, these tracings of reality could even provide a way into the map, and an understanding of the rhizome, itself.
What these commitments mean for data and data visualization
I’ve distilled the following guideposts for my efforts to craft experiments based on these theories:
Data visualizations as tracings of the rhizome. One could view a data visualization as a tracing, in that it is a model of information that is manifested / encoded visually. Guattari and Deluze characterize tracings, or structured representations like these, as dangerous: “it has generated, structuralized the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself.” Indeed, data visualizations are structured. To encode information visually, even in the most flexible models of visualizing, a structure is required. The structure being, in part, a model of variables, or data types, that link data to visual encodings. Thus, to avoid the danger of the structure they portray, visualizations must be situated within a map, a model of information, that is flexible.
Simultaneously, if enough nuance is imbued within the way in which the information is visualized, the visualization itself can serve as a pathway into a particular view into the world, especially if the map (or data model) it is linked to is exposed to contextualize the visualization. This means multiple data visualizations, using different models can sit together as different doorways into plural views of the world.
Becoming: data visualization as exposing the echoes of others on yourself. Deluze and Guattari discuss aparallel evolution; the forming of a rhizome between two organisms, the notion that echoes and connections between beings form in a more or less causal way. We’re all in the soup of the biosphere, changing the flavors of all our other vegetable cohabitants. In this rhizome between organisms, traces of one another are produced. Guarrati points out the image of the wasp on the orchid that signifies this rhizome, this becoming-wasp inherent in that visual property of the orchid. In turn, the wasp is becoming-orchid through it’s participation as a part of the orchid’s reproductive cycle. These echoes that point us towards a rhizome, a sense of interconnectivity, become key entry points in a data visualization. How could this notion be used to design for understanding how the data relate, or even more emergent properties? These echoes are the windows from tracing (data visualization) to map (data model) that we might benefit from emphasizing in our design.
Ecological metaphor to embrace other ways of knowing. To embrace not only the notion of OOO (that knowledge is situated in bodies perceiving a limited set of phenomena in a limited way) but the idea that those bodies are in themselves traces of connection, ecological metaphors are key. This is because beings such as trees, grass, etc. contain histories, traces of the world and a way to be within them. Using ecological metaphors allows us to appreciate and notice those other bodies and ways of knowing, despite not being able to experience the same phenomena. For example, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes in Braiding Sweetgrass that all pecan trees in the same grove decide to produce nuts at the same time, even if this taxing task is not ideal for a tree having a bad season. The abundance of nuts is too much for foraging animals (including humans) to consume, and thus some nuts will survive to become new pecan trees [3]. We do not know what it feels like to know that it’s time ti produce pecans, but we can appreciate the lesson of solidarity. Further, if ecological metaphors are brought somewhat alive through mechanisms such as L-systems and cellular automata, these metaphors could be imbued with of nuance and complexity, allowing us to appreciate emergence.
The project
In this project, I am to investigate how to design with a view of information centered around OOO and the rhizome by constructing data visualization experiments. The project aims to experiment with a data visualization paradigm that may afford an experience of the ecological relationships in our physical place through the lens of our own community experience. In particular, I am creating a visualization that groups of people can use to reflect upon their experiences in their communities and expose their care relationships.
To these ends, I aim to leverage the visual metaphors to aid in noticing our connectedness to non-human beings, or how the way we live is similar to others, grounded within the relationships of flora that live within the Western Allegheny Plateau bioregion. Specifically, I plan to use the interlinking root systems of Eastern Hemlock trees (the state tree of Pennsylvania), to visualize the care community members exchange.
Even more specifically, I am creating a visual of a group of people, each person represented by a tree and its roots. The roots, powered by cellular automata, grow, and link up with one another.
What I could learn
Through creating this experiment, I hope to understand how tree roots, particularly their interlinking can afford us different ways of reflecting upon our experiences.
Further, I wonder how, through creating this experiment, I can situate the project faithfully to the theories (OOO and rhizome) I am working from. I can explore how to situate my visualization as a tracing of the data model I’ve constructed to represent community experience.
Finally, I wonder how the use of a generative system (cellular automata)might imbue a sense of and emergence and complexity, allowing the exposure of the relationships community members have with one other (the “echoes”).
Who might find this interesting
There is an emerging sense in the field of data visualization that our way of understanding the world through data (largely informed by dualism, or a mechanistic worldview) is lends itself to an instrumentalization of bodies and violence. Indeed, Scholars have already began to address this concern in the digital humanities (for example, Johanna Drucker’s work on capta). A wave of artists, practitioners, and scholars have been building on this thread: Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klien’s Data Feminism project, Jenny Odell’s writing on data and Designing for the In-Between, and Safiya Umoja Noble’s work on Algorithms of Oppression, Mimi Onouha’s work on data collection and ethics. In building this experiment, I may provide some contribution to the threads these scholars and artists are considering by documenting my process through meditating on the following questions:
I. How might data visualization practitioners more effectively expose and ponder their models of information, and thus reality, in the way they design and situate their data visualizations?
II. How can we keep these data models (or maps) permeable and open, in the spirit of Rhizome?
III. How might tools such as generative systems offer novel ways of displaying data (and their relationships) through emergence and ecological metaphor?
Sources
- Being Ecological Timothy Morton
- A Thousand Plateaus. Deluze and Guattari
- Braiding Sweetgrass. Robin Wall Kimmerer
