Representation

The complied pictures of the regions of people would be displayed visually in a museum-type setting. Because the interpretation of facial expressions and body language is different for each person, the project would aim at posing a question about the nature of an environment’s effects on a person’s attitude, rather than presenting hard data of how groups of people act and what that could mean. Thus, the project would hopefully create a “forceful point of view,” by leaving the findings of the data up to interpretation and not giving any kind of conclusion for the observer to understand.

Tufte claimed that in order for a display to be graphically excellent, it must “make large data sets coherent” and “encourage the eye to compare many pieces of data.” My project would take hundreds of visual data pieces and layer them one on top of another to create a dozen or so images that the observer can interpret, thus taking an unmanageable amount of information and arranging it visually so that the observer can understand the point of the project. It would also encourage comparison of the data, both in each region’s single display and among the displays of the different regions by showing the similarities and differences between different pieces of data.

The display would be reflective of Data Art, in the sense that it would be founded on the idea of displaying a collection of data points about how people tend to act based on location and displaying them in a visual way that allows for better understanding and interpretation by the observer. It is also similar to the idea behind the Pulse Room: to create an interpretive experience where the observer can feel like a part of the artwork. Whether the observer would feel connected to the visual displays by knowing that he or she is most likely in one of the pieces or because the observer feels connected to his or her region and the way that it is visually represented, my project would allow for the observer to interact with the pieces on a more intimate level.

Tufte claimed that good data art “should reveal the data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview to the fine structure.” My project would aim to do so by allowing the viewers to not only get a broad idea of what people from a specific region look like when interacting with strangers, but also view the finer details, such as how many people used big hand gestures, and how many smiled. Small details could be learned from focusing on the general fuzziness of the pieces at a finer level.