Electronic Visualisation and the Arts London 2010

When the European Institute for Comparative Cultural Research called museums to create 'third spaces in which different groups can share a similar experience of discovery' (2008, p. 124), it was making the assumption that these spaces can be neutral, democratic, accessible, and thus universal. Such assumptions have been applied to the virtual as a third and seemingly neutral space that museums were found lacking. However, the fascination and preoccupation with the virtual, as the panacea to issues of democracy and accessibility, needs to be reconsidered and challenged. This article questions the neutrality of and degree of accessibility to the virtual space within the framework of Bourdieu’s theories and by examining the processes of construction and use of virtual art museums.

As long as there have been museum collections they have been interpreted and displayed according to the prevailing philosophy of their time. In the post-modern period many schools of thought have influenced museum interpretation, amongst them Constructivism. The model of the Constructivist Museum is one where visitors are involved in the process of interpretation and the construction of knowledge. Though examples of this have been rare in the world of physical museum display, with advances in technology and the development of the World Wide Web, visitors to online museums have more opportunity for participation.

This paper examines how and if the concept of the Constructivist Museum is manifesting itself in the world of museums and the Web. Using several online projects as examples, it seeks to discover how user-generated content is being incorporated into museums and why there is a reticence amongst the public to dispute or edit official interpretation. It examines issues of trust, authority and the challenges to the traditional hierarchy of knowledge that arise in its doing so.

This paper contends that whilst user-generated content is often encouraged on museum websites it is rarely allowed to infiltrate the official museum interpretative process and suggests that reluctance amongst museum professionals and curators to relinquish power and control might be responsible. It also suggests that museums might need to review the way they interact with their users in terms of presenting content on existing internet platforms.

Regular photographical imaging records volumetric planes with smooth surfaces. The reason is the camera’s deficiency in perceiving and documenting the visual richness of ‘persuasive’ details in life. HDR imaging methods used in creating this artwork series titled Aura helped making invisible organism-like textures emerge and point to the notions of decay and symbiosis.

The St. Willibrordus Church in the city centre of Utrecht (The Netherlands) is a prime example of the Gothic Revival architecture. The richly decorated church interior is, unfortunately, one of the best kept secrets of the city. In the semi-permanent art installation presented in this paper, imagery showing the church interior is projected on the outside walls of the entrance of the church. By projecting onto a spherical mirror suspended from the entrance ceiling, the projection is reflected onto three walls and the ceiling. The resulting image, when seen from the street-level outside, creates a perspective illusion. This paper shows how the installation was implemented in the church in an unobtrusive way, and explains the calibration system that was developed for determining the pre-distortions required to project the Trompe L'Oeil.

This paper discusses the use of visualisation to enhance audience and performer understanding of a distributed networked musical performance by addressing issues of anticipation of upcoming sonic events.

This paper is based on a five years' research focused on the measurement of cultural contribution of events of art and technology to London. Developing the concept of 'cultural capital' devised by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, it was possible to identify their 'forms', such as 'embodied', 'objectified' and 'institutionalised' as parameters to a cultural measurement system. Applying this system to evaluate the cultural potential of events of art and technology brings the 'cultural capital' concept to the 'digital age' and results in the discovery of 'digital cultural capital'. The objective is to find out how much these events can contribute to cultural arts organisations and venues, artists and curators as much to the public experience. For this evaluation, London's most important events of art and technology were identified and analysed through case studies and interviews with specialists in the field.

Internet art that employs data visualisation techniques may be engaged with both in terms of the data used and also the interface to that data. Such an approach allows it to be understood as opening the possibility of an awareness of the contingency of the way any given community is constructed. The focus is shifted away from understanding data visualisation art as providing a transparent representation of reality. This is exemplified in the work They Rule which, approached in these terms, invites an engagement with the law’s role in enabling networks of powerful people to be constructed. They Rule opens the possibility of perceiving the law’s violence in the way that it asserts the authority of enabling and enforcing the existence of such connections. An awareness of the constructed nature of legal networks opens the law to the possibility of change by those it excludes.

DeviantArt is an online community dedicated to sharing user-generated artworks. Launched in 2000, today this initiative has about 11 million members coming from over 190 countries. The website offers various web-based services to its members enabling and enforcing a strong social interaction. With its collection of around 100 million works, DeviantArt (DA) is the biggest art market of the world, presenting a new mode of displaying, evaluating and consuming arts. In that sense, DA generated a platform free of institutional and governmental politics, democratising the way arts are generated, shared and enjoyed. This paper discusses the collaborative aspects of this autonomous venue, and questions the potential of this initiative in becoming the new art venue of the 21st Century.

Art, science, mathematics, technology, engineering and medicine became concentrated in silos around the time of the reformation. This both accelerated the disciplines whilst holding back the benefits to be gained from their linking. Today they are coming back together as a much-required force for innovation and understanding at a time when we are being progressively overtaken by vast amounts of data. This in turn demands complex combinations of modelling and visualisation to engender understanding, establish confidence and aid decision-making.

In this paper we outline the issues surrounding live coding which is projected for an audience, and in this context, approaches to code visualisation. This includes natural language parsing techniques, using geometrical properties of space in language semantics, representation of execution flow in live coding environments, code as visual data and computer games as live coding environments. We will also touch on the unifying perceptual basis behind symbols, graphics, movement and sound.