[-empyre-] Vision, standards, and sound.

[Lichty, Patrick]

Patrick you touch on the need to index using some kind of visual system....

We are all aware of the  mot obvious forms of visual indexing of networked information eg tag clouds etc - to what extent do these reduce or enhance flows? And to what extent are they shaping a homogenising behaviour in networks (this has been referred to in Yvonne's posts as well)?

Jason, I wonder if the dominance of visualisation of networks abscures more interesting potential sonifications?

Following from this, what role might artists take up (speaking of artists broadly here as online art/designers) in breaking up this homogeneity? Or put more concretely - which artists/designers/visual examples are doing this now?

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Well, if you consider my polemic in saying that publishing has had a more or less homogenous culture of using tables of contents and indices, it could be that.  However, if you take my conceit to its logical extent that everything becomes a USA Today infographic, I see your point.  At the computer cultural definition of "pro-sumer" (pro-consumer, or high end non Computer Science computer user), the widespread use of plugins and customization creates standardization by market consensus of things like index clouds, even if these plugins are open source,as there are forums for production, consumption, and various forms of financial, labor, or moral support.  Therefore, in regards to homogenization, I beieve it happens, but largely due to standards by popular consensus rather than top-down fiat.

In the area of informatics and data visuaization, I find that there are certain schema that are more or less accepted, like differential charts (bar, box, pie, map, graph), but as Tufte shows, there is a plethora of tropes for visualization, and I might only be alluding to simplification through my use of graphics, and the original "blunderbuss" draft of the essay (18,000+ words) had more examples.  Beyond the formal constraints of the screen using a 2D coordinate system (for now), Keyboard and mouse (for now), and that visualiation is tied to these conventions, I feel that there are tons of people doing great work like lots of Thompson & Craighead's pieces that link media to data.

Sonification is something that I was trying to do in the 190's during one of my "blind" periods (I was legally blind for much of the 90's), The body of work was called The Grid, and it was a partnership between myself and Sseyo (now Intermorphic) that took data from architecture and realized it as environmental soundscapes.  this was a very simple analogy to Mike Philips' ArchOS, and was done from 1996-2000.

Another polemic: Sometimes, is plurality a bad idea?  Is it sometimes a bad idea to break homogeneity?  I'm sure that a few of you might be screaming "hegemony", but hear me out.  This is the difference between genetic monoculture (weak), and platform standards (stronger). To be honest, my beiefs are in between, while I feel that net art should not have been canonized to the net browser, I also feel that a protocol needs to be created to be able to communicate in a straightforward fashion. In Italy, the trains ran on time in the 40's, but in Chicago, the trains run more or less on time, which is a good analogy.  We ride a ine between fundamentaism and anarchy.  Standards, ike TCPIP, ASCII, Shift-JIS, HTML give us a lingua franca to communicate, while giving us enough freedom to use our native language with it if we wish.  On the other hand, it might be easier to just spek English, even if it is not your native language.

This is a VERY difficult position to polemicize, because it implies the virtues of a dominant culture.  I feel that monocultures are very weak structures, but perhaps a good analogy is that the Tower of Babel would have stood if it had a solid set of foundations (plural) set under a unified group of standards that allowed for improvisation and "looseness" at the top.

I could also get into a conversation regarding ow vs. high-level languages, but I want to stop for now.