white pebble syndrome

unfinished 2009 drafts #1: data visualisation

From top: Dan Hill's 'The Cloud'; 'Sound as object' via Generator X; Toyo Ito's 'Tower of Winds'; Weather Bracelet from The Teeming Void.

This is an unfinished draft from 2009, there are two others which have been chronologically placed into the archive (#2 & #3)...

The precipitation of the digital into the real has been accelerated by a virulent new wave of 'data visualisation', through which digital data and statistics are presented either through real-time displays or objects, mostly made by 'rapid prototyping' (which, as anyone who has ever used the process knows, is far from rapid).

I don’t know if you heard about it already, but Dan Hill (of City of Sound fame) recently posted about his new project: The Cloud. I won’t go into details, nor cast an opinion, but simply group it together with several other projects as examples of a New Millennium Spirit: data visualisation. In times-gone-by the problem was collecting the data, not representing it. Researchers developed speculative manners of presentation (graphs and specialist charts) and then went out into the world to collect the information. What I'm really saying is that modes of data visualisation were propositional about a certain reality.

Today, there exists way too much data: insensible and unreadable. Understandably, the challenge is in creating new ways of presenting that data. Unfortunately, very few of these modes are intuitively comprehensible. In the world of arbitrary employment of technological tools (Za … what was her name?) data visualisation has remained ‘meaningful’. But in reality, it’s just a new tool for the generation of forms and images. And yet there is something rather banal about all these works (with perhaps the exception of Ito – not out of favouritism, but simply because he was so far ahead of his times).

Baudrillard wrote: “It is the difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real.” This difference belongs to the order of representation. Though it might equally be the order of transduction: the conversion of one physical quality to another (as light to heat, kinetic energy to electricity, magnetic impulses to sound, etc). The map is in some sense a translation of the territory, from a space through the hand & mind onto the page.

Data visualisation is not the same as cartography (although cartography could be seen as a type of data visualisation, it is at its foundation a conceptual visualisation, since our perception of landscape is not a data operation) – the difference is that there is no difference between the source data and the presented data. There is no abstraction of the information, only an abstraction of the presentation of that data. The reification of the digital only produces a physical version of the electronic dross. Nothing about the information has changed, only its mode of presentation.

This goes beyond Baudrillard’s notions of simulacrum and simulation in the sense that his hyperreality had no counterpart in the real. The visualisation of the digital has recently moved from the ethereal to the real – 3d printing, and any number of other manners for turning data into objects. But what is the meaning of these objects? And what are their purposes? A map is a practical document related to the revelation of the real, but a bracelet of the year’s weather?

the seer of sheperton

Original cover for the serialised novella, now known as The Drowned World. 1962.

BALLARDIAN: (adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.

Ballard was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century, and yet he remains decidedly at the peripheries of mainstream media. I don't mean he is a cult figure, not at all – the man was so well recognised in his own lifetime that he had an adjective made of his name. He spawned his own genre of fiction. He influenced such diverse figures as Jean Baudrillard (whose commentary on Crash in Simulacra and Simulation was how I first heard of Ballard's name), Joy Division, the Klaxons, and Steven Spielberg. There are several websites dedicated to him and his works, the most famous is perhaps the Ballardian. Will Self, who was his friend for many years, recently recorded a production for Radio 4 (online here) in which he pays tribute to the 'seer of Sheperton'. Also worth a look are these images, inspired by his novel Drowned World.

Ballard died of prostate cancer several months ago.

The purpose of this post is not an attempt at summarising, or introducing, the work of Ballard. Its purpose is simply to identify one more reason that this blog is called Millennium People. Ballard's prose is rich, and over-saturated, at times heavy, even indigestible. His plots vary in subject, but rarely in theme – there is a coherent trajectory to his writing as he follows several ideas to their logical (or at times, their frighteningly realistic illogical) conclusions. His earlier works generally involve the transformation of people and societies as the world is subjected to some cataclysmic environmental change. These could be considered, perhaps, a type of science fiction set in the present day.

In The Drowned World "21st century fluctuations in solar radiation have cause the ice-caps to melt and the seas to rise. Global temperatures have climbed, and civilisation has retreated to the Arctic and Antarctic circles. London is a city now inundated by a primeval swamp, to which an expedition travels to record the flora and fauna of this new Triassic Age. " Wiki notes: "In contrast to much post-apocalyptic fiction, the novel features a central character who, rather than being disturbed by the end of the old world, is enraptured by the chaotic reality that has come to replace it."

This is a similarly prominent aspect of The Drought (as it sounds) and Hello America (due to the diversion in global air and water patterns caused by the damming of the Bering Strait the States are turned into a desert, and 100 years into the future a group of European explorers find themselves suddenly swept up by the remnants of American society, who have centred their new and violent civilization on Las Vegas).

'Enraptured by chaotic reality' is a good way to describe his middle and later works – High Rise, for example, is the story of a Corbusian-like ultra-modern tower block occupied by bored housewives and wealthy professionals that descends into a tribal warfare. Or Concrete Island, where an architect rolls his car off an overpass and finds himself trapped, marooned, between on-ramps, unable to be seen or to escape. Perhaps most famously Crash, "a story about car-crash sexual fetishism, its protagonists become sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car-crashes, often with real consequences..."

And so we come finally to Millennium People, written in 2003, and his second-last novel. Put simply, it is the tale of a middle-class revolt in a quiet suburban enclave of London called Chelsea Marina (Chelsea Harbour in reality). The protagonist is a psychiatrist searching for meaning in the death of his ex-wife, who was killed by a terrorist bomb at Heathrow Airport. By degrees he becomes involved with a bourgeois terrorist cell, who target the National Film Archives, libraries and cat shows. They are convinced that the financial obligations of the middle class (associated with consuming and possessing – homes, cars, designer clothes, etc) and the mind-numbing effects of "traditional values" on maintaining elitist social hierarchies amount to a type of present-day servitude. They equate themselves with the powerless proletariat of the Russian Revolution, and their goal is simple:

"'The travel agency you tried to attack, I assume there's a larger target... Chelsea Marina?'
'Far larger.' Relaxed again, Dexter raised his hands. 'One of the biggest of all. The 20th Century.'
'I thought it was over.'
'It lingers on. It shapes everything we do... the way we think. There's scarcely a good thing you can say for it. Genocidal wars, half the world destitute, the other half sleepwalking through its own brain-death. We bought its trashy dreams and now we can't wake up."

non-immediacy

The star-forming region LH 95 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, via Hubble (also, hi-res 2mb)

No one really supposed that light had speed, but we now know it takes 8 minutes to reach us from the sun, and two and a half years from the nearest star. When we look up at the stars we are seeing a live show taking place 30,000 years ago. An aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping events. Change is normal. The physical universe is forever changing.

This is Buckminster Fuller talking about Einstein's theories, from a video playing at the Barbican's new one (I'll write again on the exhibit itself). The video is called "Modeling Universe", and its a 1976 doco on Buckminster Fuller, by Jamie Snyder. The reason I labouriously copied down this passage was because of that one line : an aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping events.

Baudrillard writes a lot about our obsession with real time, our desire for information to be instantaneous. He says there is no point in trying to identify the world as it happens, because it is already out of date and distorted (through the lag of the eye to brain, or some other instrument of perception like a mirror). He says, in the Perfect Crime:

Thus all things offer themselves up without a hope of being anything other than illusions of themselves. Fortunately, nothing appears to us in real time, any more than do the stars in the night sky. If the speed of light were infinite, all the stars would be there simultaneously and the celestial vault would be an unbearable incandescence. Fortunately, nothing takes place in real time. Otherwise we would be subjected, where information is concerned, to the light of all events, and the present would be an unbearable incandescence. Fortunately, we live on the basis of a vital illusion, on the basis of an absence, an unreality, a non-immediacy of things.

Of course, if you suggest that there is a value to temporal setback you may as well tattoo the term Luddite to your forehead and be done with it. It seems a commonplace in contemporary architecture to try to portray the temporary, the fluid and flux – to design an architecture that is maleable and adaptable. But isn't that really a cop-out, a sidestep of the issue. By refusing to impose will into the formal (or other) structure of a project, and claiming that it will define itself, the architect avoids the responsibility to produce a formal response to a given situation.

An aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping events... What would an architecture be like that, rather than responding quickly to the ephemeral conditions of the present, attempted to (re)present the past (as a statement that the present is only the temporal offset of history): a modern stadium designed to host gladiatorial battles, a condo highrise with stables and slaves? Given how long it actually takes to construct a building, what is the maximum acceptable offset (no one, after all, complains about Sagrada Familia being out of date)?

Well. Gees, let's lighten things up a bit with a Roman joke (via Mary Beard, who is the authority on all ancient humour): A man meets a friend of his in the street and says "that's funny, I was told you were dead". The friend replies "well, you can see perfectly that I am still alive". The first man furrows his brow and says "I have to dispute that, the man who told me you were dead is much more reliable than you." Its not that bad really, when you consider that I (like many) don't get Punch at all, and that it was conceived by a whole different kind of Millennium People.

I promise tomorrow's post will be less cerebral.