The last show at Kemistry Gallery was by Nan Na Hvass and Sofie Hannibal. I went to see it.
The show centred on data visualisation and information graphics but the pieces took on an abstract form, becoming more physical and tangible by virtue of the materials used; wood, paper, ink. This seemed like a continuation of the function of info graphics, i.e to make information tangible and visual, but also a subversion of it as there was no information about the information, no context for the origin of the data.
The naming of the work continued with this, with titles such as ‘The Normal Distribution’, ‘Assorted Specimens’ and ‘A Study of a Place’ riffing off of the statistical lexicon, hinting at the data gathered, the hard science beneath the analogue prints, but never revealing. This is what made viewing the work so enjoyable, knowing that it had a basis and a reasoning but not needing to know the specifics, just appreciating the visual nature of data.
“In most contexts information graphics is the discipline of organizing information in ways that draw on locally known visual language, but seen with an outsider’s eye, often such information can be perceived as no more than an abstract pattern. We wanted to work with information in this abstract form, where the actual content and data is left a mystery, and only the form is present, letting the viewer decide which contents to assign the images.”
For my work, I will be engaging with scientific processes and thoughts but it is important to me and the project that I do not lose sight of it’s situation within New Media specifically and, in a wider sense, design. I will need visually engaging ways of representing my data and findings in order to prevent this project descending into a scientific paper. The end result must always be visual in some respects and data driven in others.