The Use of Real Data in Fine Arts for Insight and Discovery: Case Studies in Text Analysis
| Fanny Chevalier | OCAD (Ontario College of Art & Design) University |
| Sara Diamond | OCAD (Ontario College of Art & Design) University |
Published: October, 2010
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Summary
Increasingly visual artists and designers have been interested in using real data in their artwork. Although art is developed primarily for aesthetics and conceptual practices, artists provide effective, appealing and creative examples of Data Visualizations. One of the most important and transformative applications of information visualization by visual artists has been to further their interpretation, analysis and display of text. It is here that we see significant impacts on their practice and in the engagement of others with artists’ production.
Examples
The three following examples illustrate art pieces from visual artists with a strong interest in literature, linguistics and communications processes that have turned to Information Visualization as a digital.
Writing Without Words – Stefanie Posavec
Stefanie Posavec is a book cover designer who is interested in literature, poetics and visual expression. Through a random twist of fate her MA project ended up traversing the internet and she now spends free time coming up with new ways to analyze text and information for a variety of different projects, exhibitions and people.
Stefanie’s personal work verges more into data art and is concerned with the unveiling of things unseen. Writing without words is a project that explores methods of visually representing text and visualizes the differences in writing styles of various authors. For instance, Literary Organism is an amazing visualization of the structure of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, and has been widely recognized as a major visualization piece.
http://www.itsbeenreal.co.uk/
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Word cloud portraits – Dylan Roscover
Dylan Roscover is a self-described ‘design nerd’, specialized in motion+graphic design whose talent has valued the 19-years old student to be commissioned an Obama portrait by the TIME magazine.
The young artist uses words in both pattern and paint on top of real photographs to make artistic portraits. One of his first artwork is a Steve Jobs portrait, a typeface-driven design based on the “Here’s to the crazy ones” ad campaign from Apple in the 90s, using fonts present in Apple branding and products.
http://gorosco.com/
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CodezebraOS – Sara Diamond
Sara Diamond is a social historian, communications and new media theorist and creative practitioner who has been interested in online conversation.
CodezebraOS emerged, as she needed a chat environment to supplement web and performance art projects that she was undertaking with artists and scientists. The chat environment brings the Science and the Art communities together allowing them to share ideas through a unique means of interpreting and experiencing text-based online practices.
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