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data mapping into the exact opposite of the Romantic art concerned with the sublime. In contrast, data visualisation art is concerned with the antisublime. If Romantic artists thought of certain phenomena and effects as un-representable, as something which goes beyond the limits of human senses and reason, data visualisation artists aim at precisely the opposite: to map such phenomena into a representation whose scale is comparable to the scales of human perception and cognition’.5 ‘It is still an open question, however, how insights from the field of information visualisation can be used to effectively inform and educate a nonexpert audience, or even capture their attention, sufficiently engage their interests and maintain their curiosity’.6 Data visualisation can be a tool to build understanding in the perceiver because a complex dataset is filtered, scaled down, compressed, translated and represented in such way that it fits the perceiver’s perceptive and cognitive capacity. But building understanding does not yet imply that it will attract interest from and generate engagement by people. One important aspect is that of trust, which is essential to building engagement. The situation is somewhat ambivalent, as understanding information can build trust as well as suspicion in the perceiver, who on the one hand has to believe that he/she will actually be able to decode and understand the data encoded in a data visualisation. On the other hand, the perceiver optimistically also understands that, as mentioned previously, data visualisation can be manipulative or biased. But trust itself is not sufficient. Engagement needs motivation on the part of the perceiver as an individual that is based on involvement and personal experience. And, as we will see in the following, sensual experience can play a key role in this.
5 Lev Manovich, op. cit.
6 Jack Zhao and Andrew Vande Moere, ‘Embodiment in Data Sculpture: A Model of the Physical Visualisation of Information’, in Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts, New York, NY: ACM 2008.
Sensuality and metaphors in physicality
BEYOND DATA
ES SAY
‘Physicality plays a key role in understanding our environment because humans are inherently proficient in interacting with the real world using mainly auditory, visual and tactile senses. In this context, the currently pervasive, traditional screen-based approach is relatively limited in that it is unable to capture the rich experiences attributed to physicality, for it lacks the capability to stimulate any other senses than the visual’.7 From this aspect, data visualisation projects that are not merely or not primarily visual have a thriving potential for creating a sensual experience in the perceiver. Jack Zhao and Andrew Vande Moere published a study describing the concept of data sculpture in the context of related fields such as information visualisation, visualisation art, interactive art and tangible user interfaces. They describe data sculpture as a system of physical representation and abstract data linked by a relationship called embodiment. Metaphor is a contributing factor to this embodiment, as it describes the process of translating data values to representations. They also used
7 Zhao and Vande Moere (see note 6), citing Brave, S., Ishii, H. and Dahley, A., ‘Tangible Interfaces for Remote Collaboration and Communication’, in Greif, Irene (ed.), Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computersupported Cooperative Work, see: https://wiki.inf.ed.ac. uk/twiki/pub/ECHOES/ TangibleInterfaces/Brave1998. pdf.