The Aesthetics of Environmental Visualizations: More Than Information Ecstasy?
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The Aesthetics of Environmental Visualizations: More than Information Ecstasy? Heather Houser O n any day, the media consumer enters a garden of data delights just by paging through the newspaper, scanning social media feeds, and checking bookmarked blogs. Information stimulation is available everywhere in the form of data visualizations. Known variously as information visualiza- tions, infographies, or "infovis"—the industry shorthand that I use here—these digital artifacts are fast becoming ubiquitous and are particularly suited to the Internet delivery system. Infovis, in its most general definition, is "the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition" (Card, Mackinlay, and Shneiderman 1999: 7). This definition captures graphical visualizations directed at specialized audiences such as the scatter plot as well as those addressing a lay audience that is not part of an extant disciplinary conversation.! with the latter type of infovis, designers and artists are transform- ing an instrumental tool long used in the quantitative sciences into a cultural tool that manages data overload, educates publics, and vaunts principles of sophisti- cated design. Popular visualizations act as an interface between the individual and data sets that are too large, complicated, inaccessible, or tedious for him or her to comprehend. They supplement news stories, promote corporate or nonprofit cam- paigns, hang in galleries, and circulate on websites that celebrate the most scin- tillating information art. These skillful artifacts can, according to one admirer, bring the viewer to the point of "infogasm" (Larsen 2012). They entice with "the 1. An image can move between specialist and nonspecialist functions, as when a visualization first created for an academic audience—for example, the readers of Nature or Science—adorns a blog post or the New York Times. Public Culture 26;2 DOI 10.1215/08992363-2392084 Copyright 2014 by Duke University Press 319 Public Culture succinct allure of imagery" that not only pleases through astonishment but also promises to hone attention and instantaneously generate knowledge (ibid.). Infovis is protean in nature. It takes the form of maps, line graphs, flowcharts, time series displays, and trees, and straddles those time-honored functions of instructing and delighting. This essay examines two nonspecialist visualizations that made a splash in expert communities and across the Internet: Flight Pat- terns by Aaron Koblin, a visualizer with a far-reaching web and gallery presence, and The Timber Trade, an image that WWF (also known as the World Wild- life Fund for Nature) commissioned from GOOD (a blog, magazine, and design firm). Unlike specialist visualizations. Flight Patterns and Timber Trade rely on data that the designers did not themselves generate. This distinction clarifies the place of popular infovis in its cultural moment. Like the born-digital experimen- tal literature that Kenneth Goldsmith describes, popular infovis is "uncreative." The new style of innovator is one who cuts through the "thicket of information" that surrounds him or her and exhibits "genius" through "mastery of information and its dissemination" (Goldsmith 2011: 1). Though Goldsmith studies primarily literary culture, the process of recombining words and images culled from other sources applies equally well to visual culture. In both domains, the artist "filters" and "parses" rather than inventing de novo; clever selection and juxtaposition are his or her techniques (ibid.: 158-59). Or, put differently by Lev Manovich (2001: 124), in the early twenty-first century "authentic creation" is "replaced by selec- tion from a menu." In contrast to much uncreative writing, visualizers' processes of selection respect the integrity of their raw materials. Though artists may not generate the data, their images must retain a degree of facticity at the same time as they engage audiences affectively, cognitively, and ethically. As a type of uncreative creativity that adapts to changing media delivery sys- tems, infovis contributes to contemporary aesthetic and technological trends that emerge in the current age of information. They thus merit the attention of cultural critics. More specifically, those visualizations with an agenda centered on environmental issues invite questions from environmental critics about how their aesthetic features render visible and relevant the complexity of the phe- nomena that they depict. Environmentalists confront the task of changing public consciousness about issues such as global commerce and climate change in part by disseminating information, even as the wired public faces a deluge of some- times contradictory or contested information. Environmentally focused infovis manages that information and aims to position viewers as responsible agents of knowledge. The viewer is frequently an implied world citizen who is technologi- cally literate and English-speaking and, depending on the context, may also be a 320 museumgoing aesthete.^ Crucially, the audience is imagined to contribute to the Aesthetics of conditions that the data engender. Specialist visualizations are meant to "move Environmental nature to the page" to further scientific inquiry, techniques, and tools (Daston Visualizations and Galison 2010: 121). Even if their accuracy and efficacy are under dispute, such images edify the audience within disciplinary paradigms, but neither the visualization nor the originating data invite the viewer to see him- or herself as complicit in the real-world processes under investigation. By contrast, popular infovis with an environmental focus implicates its audience in the information that it communicates and suggests that knowing the data is coextensive with being responsible for it. For these reasons, the predominant aesthetic principles not only have epistemological implications; they also make ethical appeals. Flight Patterns and Timber Trade address differing concerns: the former shows the number of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)-monitored planes crossing North American airspace over twenty-four hours, while the latter depicts the traffic in wood products between exporting and importing nations around the globe. Despite their varying themes, the works both depict commercial trends using what I call a connect-the-dots aesthetic, constituted by an aerial perspec- tive and finite lines, that privileges simplicity, transparency, and speed. I peg this aesthetic to an uneasy globalism and argue that values of data transparency mini- mize the difficulties of knowing in contexts marked by uncertainty and misinfor- mation. Without question infovis is concise, vibrant, Internet ready, and perhaps even "infogasmic" and is a compelling means of bodying forth complex envi- ronmental and geopolitical arrangements. But can it be a techno-fix for environ- mental engagement? Or do its predominant aesthetic and epistemological values occlude the need to search for alternative dispositions toward environmentally damaging global commerce? Connect the Dots: Ciobe and Line Infovis isn't new to environmental discourse, as former vice president Al Gore's PowerPoint-driven An Inconvenient Truth (dir. David Guggenheim; 2006) read- ily attests. In a scene that combines the documentary's anecdotal and didactic modes. Gore examines Roger Revelle's line charts of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration over the Pacific Ocean and cites them as his inspiration for climate activism beginning in the 1960s. For the film's information-rich climax, 2. When Andrew Losowsky (2001: 5) chides the field for being "painfully lacking in diversity." he speaks to the scene of production, but the same assessment likely pertains to the scene of con- sumption as well. 321 Pubiic Cuiture Figure 1 Aaron KobVm, Flight Patterns. "The patins of air traffic over North America visuaiized in color and form." Digital image. Courtesy of the artist Gore traces 650,000 years of CO2 levels and temperature variation in a visualiza- tion derived from paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson's research. Dramatizing the expression "off the charts," he climbs into a cherry picker that carries him up the giant screen to trace the staggering projections for CO2 and temperature increase over the next fifty years. Along with other specialist visualizations such as climatologists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes's ger- minal and controversial "hockey stick" graph, Revelle's and Thompson's charts have visually shaped current environmental debate. They have done so because environmentalists have trusted in their ability to shock and maybe even dismay audiences while bringing data into the home and out of the lab. With more sophisticated computing tools and techniques at their command, twenty-first-century visualizers such as Koblin innovate ways of delivering sta- tistics to diverse publics. Koblin's star as a visualizer began to rise in 2005, when he released a series of images under the title Elight Patterns (see figs. 1-3).^ The visualizations earned him first prize in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) 3. Koblin first created Flight Patterns for the Celestial Mechanics project at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the Department of Design Media Arts. The visualizations were shown at the Japan Media Arts Festival and Ars Electrónica, among other venues, and were published in the proceedings of the 2009 SIGGRAPH Asia conference (Koblin 2009b). 322 Aesthetics of Environmental Visualizations