Dennis Hollingsworth

combatINFOcenter

This post is a bookmark for a super cool blogpost called Visualizing: tracing an aesthetics of data* from We Make Money Not Art, "All you ever wanted to know about data visualization".

After spending some time in the Navy when I was a kid, working as an Operations Specialist in a place called Combat Information Center (thus, the title of this post as well as my YouTube moniker), and my first degree in architecture (an art and profession which is supremely positioned in our epoch to manage and interpret huge amounts of data... but unfortunately few if any academics in this particular field have focused upon this point of view), I have an abiding interest in data visualization. This blogpost is a great summary of the state of the art in this regard, something I want to spend some time with and click all the links provided.

I have a notion afloat of creating a version of a Combat Information Center (we called it C.I.C.), a kind of live-in installation (a couple of assistants, a dark room, spotlights, flatscreens, red lights, walls painted flat black...) where I crunch data (surf the internet among other sources tv and radio...), and represent findings in various modes (sculpture in the mode of architectural model making, drawing and painting...) for a month or so.

Ah, what fun that would be!

*I do wonder about the blogpost title, "...aesthetics of data". It is a strange formalism that seems to distract from the conceptual objective of the manipulation of data viz. Shouldn't it be rather, the "...aesthetics of data synthesis" or something like that?

Anyhoo...