Pluralist Narratives in Digital Art and Philosophy

Much of contemporary human endeavor involves both art and technology. Objects are both technologized and aesthetically designed. Apple forever changed the expectation of high-quality technology and design in objects. Information visualization, 3-D printing, personal data, video games, and de novo biological design (e.g.; proteins, other molecules, synthetic biology) are some examples of the strong linkage between technology and aesthetic design.

Artists, scientists, and individuals alike are exploring these new venues of information, software, personal data, biology, and virtual reality for discovery and creative expression. Online tools facilitate the process and compress the required learning curves for proficiency.

As a result, there is a shift away from the institutional production of knowledge to include the more democratized production of art, science, technology, objects, and knowledge by individuals and crowds. This helps to enact change at three levels: a greater range of interesting and useful objects and technologies coming into existence; more fulfillment and expression of human creative potential; and new kinds of knowledge and meaning-making narratives about the world.

The Quantified Self becomes the Qualified Self and the Exoself

Quotable quotes from the third Quantified Self conference held at Stanford University September 15-16, 2012. 

• Can I query my shirt or am I limited to consuming the querying that comes packaged in my shirt?
• Quantified Self enables the constant creation of this thing called the self
• We think more about our cats/dogs than we do our real pets, our microbiome
• Information conveyance, not dataviz
• Quantified emotion and data sensation (haptics)
• Display of numerical data and graphs are the interface
• Quantifying is the intermediary step...exosenses (haptics, wearable electronic senses) is really what we want
• Perpetual data explosion
• Our mission as Quantified Selves is to discover our mission

Figure 1. Word Cloud Visualization of Agenda Topics at the third Quantified Self Conference.

The Infovizzy Social Layer

In the current era of big data, it is increasingly expected that there be some way to visualize data in a readily consumable infographic. Figure 1 shows one such example, for the social networking site, LinkedIn, with the infographic web service provided by LinkedIn Maps. The nodes in the social networking fabric are other individuals.

Figure 1. Infographic of One Person’s LinkedIn Relationships.

Looking at the figure, some of the aspects to notice are that this person is interacting in different kinds of communities. One of the kinds of communities is clusters that have some high degree of central linkage (the pink and green clusters on the right). Another kind of community is those where the connected people are themselves more broadly linked (the majority of the fabric, around the name box). The farther away communities in the infographic are separated by time (graduate school), and distance (different geographical continents).

However, all of this could be misleading, because the algorithms applied to execute the visualization might not be the most accurate mapping of the relationships with this person and these communities in real life. Also the visualization has an inherent relativism that may result in bias. The infographic is indicative of this person’s relationships in those communities, not conclusive information about the communities themselves.

This kind of infovizzy display could be extended as a digital anthropology tool for viewing the overlaid networks of whole communities. More complete inferences could then be made regarding the closeness and closedness, expansivity, density, breadth, volume, fluidity, and connectedness of different communities. Time lapse analysis could show how and how fast communities grow and fade, especially assessing which kinds of new elements come into communities to sustain and broaden them. Performance metrics for the quality of output of communities could be developed, where relevant.