In his presentation at MOTI‘s “I don’t know where I’m going but I want to be there” theoretical neurobiologist Mark Changizi elaborated on the research method he applies to investigate the field of why it is that the human brain processes optical information like it does. Instead of trying to look for answers in and around the exact ‘wiring’ of our brains, which largely is still a black box, Changizi in his books looks at the natural and evolutionary indicators that have influenced how our brains process imagery.

Rather than looking at why the brain responds like it does to visual cultural artifacts, this approach of looking at how natural selection affected visual perception, to Changizi, seems more fruitful when discussing design as something that has emerged out of cultural selection. Since the visual and oral tradition is a predominant aspect of society, Changizi describes culture as “a new kind of blind watch maker”.

In his books, “The Vision Revolution” and the recently published “Harnessed“, Changizi seeks out parameters that have their origin in nature such as color, the starburst shape, writing and music. For example, the starburst shape which is commonly used in design, can be found moving quickly through space (streaks start appearing from a center point). What is eventually applied in design is an optical illusion of movement; it generates the perception of how the world will look in the matter of a second.

One of the other disciplines that can be explained through natural selection is music of which the variables can be traced within the sounds made by humans. For example, beat and rhythm can be connected to gait, pitch to direction, loudness to distance and tempo to speed. Eventually, the binding factor in the relation between music and human dynamic can be found in that they share the property of having a trajectory; “a fictional story of a movement in space which can be ultimately understood through nature”.

In conclusion, Changizi believes that in order to understand why aspects in design and visual and oral culture exist and operate like they do, neuroscientists beyond looking at the brain for results, should not shy away from a nature-harnessing methodology to “fill in the unexplanatory”.

From video artist Joanne Richardson (GER) was invited to give a presentation in the session called “Online Video as a Political Tool”, she immediately had problems with the terms ‘online’, ‘political’ and ‘tool’. As Marx had wrote in the Economic Transcript, a social revolution will “not get to the next stage” when the state is used as means to overthrow the state. Here’s the opposition between Heideger (using the available tools) and Nietzsche (somehow doing something completely different) becomes relevant in considering the subjectivity of activism and the traps of deconstruction, a few of the central topics in Richardson’s work.

As Richardson was a participant in the Romanian ‘indie media’, the question of “what is it that makes our media other than other media?” started bothering her. Even more, the online tools that had been made available had proven to be largely a celebration of openness and accessibility itself. Making video users into producers would clearly not have brought new models of producing, “what makes video activism different other than putting it into the hands of the users?” To come back to Marx’ point: don’t these approaches by the masses still follow the same ways of production as with ‘other propaganda’?

After stumbling upon a film of Jean-Luc Godard that displayed a political struggle, for Richardson this was the shift from “[political] content to the mode of production.” Following from this shift of production were different strategies to depict political agendas. The first one, that of image reference, is about the relationship that truth claims. By questioning the image and the reference political film-making would act as a ‘counter-documentary’.

Another aspect, that of form and content occurs when “the form is made of elements that don’t fit, [consequently] it asks the audience to take its part and create meaning.” Richardson here mentions the a montage method in which footage from different political events are mixed together and suggest a collective social struggle while in fact the ideological contexts were hardly comparable.

In “2 or 3 Things About Activism“, Richardson deconstructs the effects of montage. In the former work, she uses different kinds of fragments which gradually fall apart and thus create a distance between the viewer and the objectivity of the image. Overall, Richardson stresses the importance of this ‘critical distance’, as the viewers “should not create identification but [...] make them think for themselves and reconsider the relation to the image.”

Photo by Anne Helmond.

In Friday’s first session called “It’s Not a Dead Collection, it’s a Dynamic Database”, media archivist and researcher Teague Schneiter (US/CA) took off with an elaboration about the ‘IsumaTV‘ project she’s currently working on. The people behind this initiative aim to set up an accessible infrastructure for streaming and uploading video content in indigenous subcultures. This is not only a technological challenge, but also requires a lot of media literacy within these communities. Other than with traditional heritages, it doesn’t focus on the long-term storage but instead prioritizes the accessibility of the users.

When it comes to the technological part of accessibility, the project would require a solid approach to work for the across different communities. Since the Inuit areas are largely isolated from ‘regular’ broadband services (the costs / bandwidth speed ratio is one of the aspects that widens the ‘digital divide’), the organisation introduced special media boxes into these indigenous communities. Through this local server network, the IsumaTV network performs much better than mainstream platforms like YouTube or Facebook would have. Moreover, having a stand-alone video platform overall increases the feeling of (reclaiming) ownership, “it helps with having a good relationship with the users.” Even though the technological trade-off is that the network updates with a delay of about a week, this is still acceptable for a project with a goal to preserve cultural heritage.

In the end, the project seems very worthwhile. Especially in the “era of of rapid change, [in which] indigenous groups seek to preserve their subculture”. Since the project started in 2008, over 2000 videos in more than 41 languages have been uploaded as well as pictures and text. Content-wise, it proves to be valuable to have the locals themselves act as curators, instead of having slightly related ‘outsiders’ maintain the archives. The fact that the communities rely mainly on verbal communications is another point that video creates a lot more insight into the different cultures.

Future plans with this initiative are to attract more sponsors like repositories, institutes, museums and participatory media (especially now the Canadian government has cut the budget), as well as to add crowd-source (subtitling or voice-over) features as well as further improving the network its accessibility.

Photo by Anne Helmond
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That said. The second update is that I blogged for the Economies of the Commons 2 event on Saturday. The conference consisted of seminars, and intense theoretical as well as straight-forward practical presentations. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to follow the stream during for the entire conference (due to office occupations), but the third day I contributed to the blog with two articles, the first one being a report of the presentation by Harry Verwayen (about Europeana) and the second being about Dolf Veenvliet’s talk of ‘opening up’ as a 3d artist.

Participating in a group of enthusiastic bloggers has been a good experience, and it also helped that I enjoyed the conference (or at least, the few sessions I was able to join) in general quite much. I’d definitely look out for similar opportunities in the future!

Ibb and Obb – The production of an indie-game

The first speaker of the evening, Richard Boeser, elaborated on the production of an indie game called Ibb and Obb. What started out as his graduation project his Industrial Design program in 2007, four years later, he had assembled a production team to work on the game – ranging from a programming studio (Codeglue) to a music composer (Kettel).

The is basically a side-scroll platform game with a strong emphasis on co-operative gameplay. As the game characters are able to traverse the top and bottom of the surface, they clear their path from enemies and obstacles.

Design process on steroids

The project’s research phase was very straight forward; as Boeser explains, the starting point was to develop a gameplay mechanic which genuinely appealed to him. The sketches that followed then, were excessive form experiments that seemed to push the boundaries (at least visually) of the 3d engine he used at the time. Finally, with the same engine, a mock-up was created that resembled Ibb and Obb. At that point, Boeser immediately felt that, while it was merely a ‘simple’ toy, it had great potential to grow out to a game.

After three of his post-grad years, which Boeser called this the ‘in-between phase’, he started a company named Sharpweed, and financed the production of the game by funds such as Gamefonds and Rotterdam Media Fonds. Technically, more and more mechanics were added to the gameplay. Also, the team tries build a community on Facebook to pitch ideas and designs to.

Mapping Dutch vacant buildings

The second speaker of the evening would be landscape architect Ronald Rietveld, who created a Dutch pavilion as a part of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010. Initially, the invitation for the submission came from Nederlands Architecteninstituut (NAi) who asked them to “contribute to societal issues” and to “connect vacancy to the potential of knowledge economy”. The focus here  shouldn’t be on office blocks (who would want to promote those on a biennale?), but rather on historical buildings like monasteries, bunkers, fortresses et cetera.

The question that was posed was – with the creative industries being high on the Dutch political agenda, together with i.e water management – how to reinvent and facilitate not only the buildings themselves, but their use and its dynamic. From a critical perspective, one could ask what the relation between ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘creative industry’ is (as Rietveld often mentioned them together) in terms of progress, economic benefits and production. As far as I’m concerned, the concept of the ‘creative industry’ exists “only in the heads of bureaucrats” as Geert Lovink puts it (Lovink, 2008: 47).

Some of the visitors wouldn't even notice the ceiling ..

With the Vacant NL, Rietveld Landscape indexed the range of monumental vacant buildings, and subsequently mapped them in CAD software. These architectural models were printed with a 3d printer, and a giant installation was assembled with these prints. Indeed, the installation together with “The Dutch Atlas of Vacancy” presents us with a great potential for the emergence of creative hot-spots. Although, I’m a bit skeptic (and I suspect the audience was as well) about the political ambitions of the project. Especially, with the current threat of the ‘cultuurkaalslag‘ (subsidiary cuts), the revolution in urban planning that is needed for the growth of the new (pluriform) creative industry seems to become increasingly unlikely.

Playing and gaming in Rotterdam South

Third up, after the break, was director of The Patching Zone, Anne Nigten. In ‘her’ laboratory, teams consisting of post-grads, post-docs and other professionals develop social, local projects through ‘artistic play’. With their current project ‘Go-for-IT!‘, commissioned by Rotterdam South Pact, the consortium of boroughs in the district, the city counsel and housing corporations, the institute seeks for ways to improve the living quality and to enhance the cultural richness in Rotterdam South.

The roadmap for their projects aims to involve the target group, called ‘stakeholders’, as much as possible. They are often asked to assist with creating and test prototypes to really gain a feeling of being co-owners of the project. (This is done to prolong the project’s lifecycle.) Meanwhile, research teams that are initially not familiar with the environment, reside in the project’s neighborhood.

In the Go-for-IT! project, the team searched for ways to incorporate the ideas of ‘embodied interaction’ (Dourish, 2001), in which through “tangible and social computing” a shared experience emerges. The original concept was to have a space consisting of tiles that form the user interface, subsequently a range of games was developed and tested by the local community. Although the prototype was still a bit buggy, it would run for at least a year before the team could start developing again.

Radioscape – Loafing around in with antenna’s

In the last presentation, sound artist Edwin van der Heide, elaborated on his Radioscape project. As he explained, the development telematic soundscape ecology (sort of an instant collaborative RjDj-experience) with using radio transmitter technology become bothersome multiple times (I will spare you the technological obstacles.)

While originally the idea of sending and receiving was first to be implemented in Japan, Van der Heide soon found out that the transmission of radio-waves isn’t all that reliable in terms of scalability. (For example: if users would stand in close spaces, transmitting soon becomes too noisy to be useful.)

As Van der Heide explains: “we are not used to sending and receiving with ‘normal’ radio”. Yet, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger discusses the cause for this is not only the lack of technological progress:

“Every transistor radio is, by the nature of its construction, at the same time a potential transmitter; it can interact with other receivers by circuit reversal. The development from a mere distribution medium to a communications medium is technically not a problem. It is consciously prevented for understandable political reasons. The technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers, which in the consciousness industry becomes of particular political importance.” (Enzensberger, 1970)

Eventually, Van der Heide set up a prototype in the Leidseplein in Amsterdam, for the square’s not too crowded, wide and open. The antenna people were carrying along would transmit sound loops that would be transformed with the slightest move, due to the amount of parameters, the participant would feel that the sound was generated at random instead of out of a recognizable pattern.

Radioscape was also set up in Dordrecht

The device would also consist of a map that would display the active area. Since there were two antenna’s, and stereo headphones attached to the device, people could navigate towards a signal and experience the spatial acoustics.

Food for thought

To wrap this post up: This Happened #7 was quite inspiring. Richard Boeser’s indie-game showed a lot of potential by introducing a fresh and solid game-mechanic. Rietveld Landscape with their installation showed there’s a vast opportunity for the knowledge economy to redeem historic buildings. After the break, Anne’s elaboration on the embedded research and ‘play & create’-philosophy in Go-for-IT! seemed like an interesting, unconventional and especially respectful one. And finally, the Radioscape project introduced interesting (social and spatial) dimensions of radio transmission, while using radio technology as a broadcasting apparatus.

FYI: The eight edition of ‘This Happened’ will be held November, 22th.

Sources:

• Photos by Kars Alfrink, some rights reserved.
• Dourish, Paul. Where The Action Is (2001).
• Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Constituents of a Theory of the Media (1970). In ‘The New Media Reader’.
• Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments (2008).

‘Variety’ is inspired by the fact that several art forms – sound, animation, graphic compositions – are transformed easily in both appearance and being. During the evening local performers share the stage with the Wojciech Kosma, Vladimir Nikolic, Tao Lin, Kristin Lucas, Adrian Piper, Pierre Bismuth and Claire Fontaine. With dictions, videos, dance and music performances, ‘Variety’ ties together in a way that they are experienced as performances, and thus allow original interpretations to emerge.

Tickets cost €5 (student fee is €2,50), you can reserve seats by e-mail (reservations@nimk.nl) or phone (020 6237101). Also, tickets can be bought (in advance) starting at July 8th, at the NIMk institute (starting 6pm) or at De Brakke Grond (starting 7pm). The show starts at 8.30pm at the Rode Zaal in De Brakke Grond. Official press release (Dutch) can be found here. (While the press release says local artists will join the performance, I’m not sure in what language it will be. I’ll keep you posted on that.)

Additionally, at the same night, there’s another edition of Test_Lab will be held V2_ (Rotterdam) called ‘The Invisible City’, here’s a copy of the press release:

Opening: Theo Deutinger (AT/NL), TD Architects

Demonstrations: Selena Savic (SRB), Piet Zwart Institute | David Benque (FR), Royal College of Art | Michael Dotolo (US), Frank Mohr Institute | Renee Hulshoff (NL), Royal Art Academy | Gabriel Vanegas (CO), Academy of Media Arts Cologne | Oliver Goodhall (UK), Royal College of Art

Performance: Joram Kroon, a.k.a. Prace (NL), Utrecht School of the Arts

As Italo Calvino illustrates in his classic novel Invisible Cities, the notion of ‘city’ extends far beyond its visible physical architecture. A city is characterized as much by the ways in which its urban life is organized, the problems and threats it faces and the memories, desires and fears of its inhabitants, as by the buildings and spaces that define its physical form. Due to the rapid and ongoing process of urbanization – resulting in half of humanity now living in urban environments – we are forced to radically rethink our cities. While we can see our physical urban environments transforming at a rapid pace however, who is rethinking the ‘invisible’ counterparts that Calvino wrote about almost forty years ago?

Artists, architects, and designers play an important role in revealing ‘invisible’ aspects of cities, often providing new insights into how our cities function and develop. To rethink the ‘invisible city’ under the pressure of rapid urbanization, this edition of Test_Lab will feature a selection of freshly graduated artists, architects, and designers from European art and design academies whose projects explore the invisible aspects of our contemporary urban environments. The selected projects range from artistic representations of invisible cities, to simulations of urban economy and concrete scenarios for urban production and energy development. As it is custom to the Test_Lab event series, the audience will form the critical test panel for the demonstrated works and will be invited to examine each graduation project ‘hands-on’.

The evening kicks off with an introduction by the Rotterdam-based urban mapping expert Theo Deutinger, features a special opening of Disrupting Systems (see inset), and closes with a live music set about one of the world’s most conflict-ridden places.

Although both events look good, without being aware that they’re held simultaneously, I registered for Variety. Test_Lab’s line-up seems solid as ever, and it’s likely to be less abstract than Variety, I would also highly recommend it. Cheers.

The film has been released today and will be screened this week througout The Netherlands (Utrecht, Eindhoven, Nijmegen, Den Haag, Amsterdam) along with Q&A with the director afterwards. Judging from the trailer, the film tells a story of virtual immersion, relationships and escapism, here’s the synopsis coming from the official site:

Jitze, a young Dutch professional gamer, travels the world to compete in video game tournaments. During a stay in Taipei his arm starts to hurt and he’s forced to take a few days rest. A night in his hotel, Jitze meets a girl and starts realizing what it means to be human in the age of the virtual worlds.

While there have been interesting cinematographic explorations of the (full) disembodiment in for example Submarine’s My Second Life or the online performance I’m Garrett Lynch (IRL), it’s good to come across a narrative in which material and virtuality characteristics intertwine as a part of the plot. As a side-note, it’s also ironic to see that Second Life is turning into a tool for film-makers and artists (treating the environment as one that has never actually existed), now that it’s largely abandoned by commercial parties.

Finally, here are this week’s screening dates, and the film’s trailer:

Thursday evening at 19.30, the 10th of June at ’t Hoogt, Utrecht

Wednesday evening at 19.30, the 16th of June at Eindhoven Plaza

Thursday evening at 20.30, the 17th of June at Kriterion Amsterdam

Friday evening at 20.00, the 18th of June at Nijmegen LUX

Saterday evening at 19.30, the 19th of June at Filmhuis Den Haag

Sunday evening at 19.30, the 20th of June at EYE Amsterdam

Anyhow, although UvA professor Jan Simmons is involved in the first session, I have really no clue of what to expect from this workgroup’s aims and/or findings, more or less the same goes for the rest of the program with exception for Karen Lancel’s ‘Tele_Trust‘ project which I’ve been following since it first (?) appearance at V2_‘s Test_Lab.

Here’s a copy of the official press release:

An evening conversation on interface studies.
Location: NIMk
Date: Friday June 18, 2010
doors open 8:00 p.m., program begins 8:30 p.m.
Entrance free
Please make reservations (elena@salto.nl)
(English spoken)

At this evening session, the Interface Studies Group will present the ‘interface’ as the centre of technology mediated experience and will reveal trends, notions and tangible prototypes that stretch and challenge the still predominant screen – spectator arrangement.
In contrast with traditional cinema and TV, in what may be called the ‘post-PC’ era, mobile and haptic interfaces and Reactive Environments are putting the embodied presence of the user back on stage. By engaging other senses and modalities such as touch, voice, movement and mobility and by taking into account the user’s sensorial and affective dimensions, new forms of interaction, knowledge production, and forms of sociality are made possible.

Program:

20:00 Doors open with DJ/VJ Emile Zile. Artist and Performer.

20:30 Welcome by Heiner Holtappels, Director of NIMk.

20.35 hrs Jan Simons – Beyond the desktop’. Presentation of the Interface Studies research group and lecture.
Media Theory author and researcher, Associate Professor ASCA/UvA.
20.55 hrs Ben Salem – ‘Designing reactive environments’.
Architect, Assistant Professor TU/e. Going beyond Ambient Intelligence into enhanced environment. (http://bsalem.info/)

Break

21.30 hrs Lilia Pérez, – ‘Just Touch’. An overview on touch as a paradigm for human-computer interaction. (http://liliaperez.net/)
Digital Artist, Interaction Designer and Researcher, PhD Candidate
21.45 hrs Jorge Alves Lino, ‘Responsive environments in the context of public space and large scale installation’ (http://jorgelino.com/)
Concept Designer, PhD Candidate TU/e
22.00 hrs Noam Knoller, ‘Interface Visions of Storytelling’ (http://www.knoller.com/)
Interaction designer/artist, filmmaker, PhD Candidate ASCA/UvA
22:15 hrs Karen Lancel, ‘TELE_TRUST in the context of artistic interfaces’
Digital artist, PhD Candidate ASCA/UvA. (http://lancelmaat.nl/)

22:30 Feel the bodily turn! – Drinks, Music and Interaction!

After the lectures, works in progress and interesting prototypes will be presented by guest artists and designers and made available for the public to try.

Special guest Installation: Social Soundmachine – feeling the music!
by Ramon Schreuder (Lewis & Davis – studio for experience design)
“Social Soundmachine is an interactive tabletop, on which people can create electronic music together. It uses a special multi-touch surface with a number of tangible game pieces.” URL: http://socialsoundmachine.com

Hope to see you all there!

Update: I just couldn’t resist to create this playlist:

Uploaded by Makz on Flickr.com, Some Rights Reserved.

Later this month an extraordinary evening will be hosted at the Waag Society by Rob van Kranenburg. While you might know him from his recent publication The Internet of Things (which covers the society of control and hacktivistic approaches), I’ve come to meet him a couple of times during discussion groups organized by a fellow student, Ramses Petronia. In these multidisciplinary discussions groups, topics like distributed, open networks, and appropriate democracies for the digital age have been covered a lot, and were overall quite exciting. (Let me know if you’d like to join these discussions sometime).

With this upcoming event, an international panel will discuss the micro-politics that emerged in the Pakistani city, Karachi, where organisation and intellectual property are constantly reinvented by local parties. Geert Lovink will also join the discussion by elaborating on his notion of ‘organized networks’ as a political structure.

Here’s some more information on the event coming from the mailing-list:

Rumana Husain, author of Karachiwala will launch her book in the Netherlands
Mukhtar Husain, author of ‘100+1 Pakistani Architects and their Own Houses‘
Atteqa Malik, from Mauj Collective Karachi skyping in
Geert Lovink, from Institute of Network Cultures on Organized Networks

(Rumana Husain) Karachiwala describes the diversity and change within Karachi, as a microcosm not only of Pakistan but of the entire south Asian region. A Subcontinent within a City : “I have always been curious about different peoples: who they are, where they come from, the languages they speak, the clothes they wear, the food they eat, what their beliefs are, the varied customs and traditions they observe, and what they do for a living.

This book is a study of — and a tribute to — that diverse mix of people who inhabit Karachi.”

A noted architect and interior designer, Mukhtar Husain did something unusual cataloguing and presenting the houses architects have designed for their own living. The pictorial volume shows the personality, design philosophy and lifestyle of each architect.

(Atteqa Malik) Mauj Collective for Open Technology, Art & Culture. Mauj Collective is conducting a study on e-Culture and New Media practices in Pakistan. It covers the arts, social development, business and nonprofits.

Geert Lovink will discuss ‘Organized Networks‘. The celebration of network cultures as open, decentralized, and horizontal all too easily forgets the political dimensions of labour and life in informational times. Why have radical social-technical networks so often collapsed after the party? What are the key resources common to critical network cultures?

Host: Rob van Kranenburg
This evening is made possible by the Prince Claus Fund and Waag Society.

See you the 24th.

As I wrote in a previous blog-post, Yuri supervised the Info-Visualisation course at the UvA in which a conference was organized by the students to present their products.

'The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook', an interactive data-visualisation by Matt McKeon

Apart from the interesting concepts, developed by multidisciplinary teams, presentations were held by various keynote speakers. I took the following notes from the keynote of researcher, designer, and founder of VisualComplexity.com, Manuel Lima about the uprise of both the blog and the field of data-visualisations in general.

Lima started off by what has inspired him to theorize and write about data visualisation practices (one of them was ’The Understanding Spectrum‘ by Nathan Shedroff) and quickly proceeded with a historiography of visual culture. While people throughout the centuries have sought new ways to present data, described in for example the Alfred Crosby’s in ‘The measure of reality‘, by “quantifying the unquantifiable” (Lima, 2010), collecting and organizing this data – with today’s technologies these processes has seem to become much more mathematically precise and efficient.

Lima continued by pinpointing five aspects that caused the visualisation techniques to emerge so rapidly. First there is the capabilities of data storage. Following Moore’s law of storage and computer chip research growing exponentially, also Kryder’s law – of “everything that can be digital, will be – applies here. Furthermore, software tends to follow along the lines of these ‘laws’; where the most largest encyclopedia – the French Encyclopedia – consisted of 17.000 articles, published in 53 volumes, the English version of Wikipedia surpassed 3 million articles, and would consist of 1.300 volumes (of text-only).

The second reason why the field has expanded so greatly is due to the fact more and more parties (institutions, businesses, governments et cetera) tend make their data open and accessible. Also the software to build these datasets, like Swifel or Many Eyes, are used widely. But, as another keynote speaker, Daniel Aguilar from Bestiario, would argue: many of the open platforms that promote themselves as such, are in fact limited or unstructured (for example, a client only offered a collection of flat Acrobat Reader files), which make this ‘openness’ seem more like a buzz-word.

Thirdly, datasets of social platforms have grown immensely, from tagged Flickr photos to workout information (Nike+), and currently with the #hashtags of Twitter (recently, the hashtags of the Dutch political debate, #rtldebat, popped up as first in the worldwide Trending Topics), people are willingly engaging with ongoing trends through different means of producing and sharing.

Fourthly, tools have become available at a great scale, from Adobe Flash to Prefuse or Processing. While some of them require advanced programming knowledge others offer templates level the production field.

Lastly, mainstream media have adopted visualisation methods quickly thus taking it out of the academic sphere. Through publishing these graphics the became popular amongst readers, and gives traditional media the chance to explore communicating through graphics. Common examples are visuals in the New York Times or even NRC.next.

In conclusion, Lima sees there’s still a lot work to do, to finally develop the ‘new science field’, most notably, a “taxonomy is needed to meet the requirements” (Lima, 2010). He tries to cover the existing models (i.e radial or 3d globes) as well as explore some future directions in his upcoming book (unfortunately, I couldn’t find a link anywhere). Also, the exploration of potential interaction techniques still has a long road ahead to eventually make “use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representation of abstract data to amplify cognition” (Voigt, 2002) in empirically effective ways.

Finally, fundamental questions arise from current visualisations. For example, while comparing the mapping projects of ‘Mouse’s neuronal network’ and ‘Millennium simulation’ they tend to behave in striking similar ways. In that sense, data-mapping can give us understanding of both micro- as meso and macro-patterns in nature or culture and draw lines between them, and thus seem to offer us exciting new tools for a broad range of research fields.

• Voigt, Robert (2002), An Extended Scatterplot Matrix and Case Studies in Information Visualization, Master’s thesis, Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal, 2002, Classification and Definition of Terms