Idea 1:

I’m interested in exploring topics in the area of scientific imaging and data visualization based on research I’ve done in the areas of the history of scientific objectivity (see notes here) and information visualization. Epistemological historian Lorraine Daston’s research introduces a notion called “mechanical objectivity” which describes the attempt of modern imaging technologies (from scientific atlas drawing, to the camera obscura, then the modern photograph) to create representations that achieve “truth-to-nature” (what’s depicted in the image accurately describes the actual phenomena). Modern photography for scientific imaging was an attempt to remove human intervention from the process altogether, but what it really did was shift the faculties of human judgement from the expert (the scientist) to the layperson.

I think Daston’s ideas have far reaching implications regarding today’s technological landscape, particularly with the rise of big data over the past several decades, opening the floodgates for any individual to gain seemingly infinite perspective for any given phenomenon.

“Seeing the whole world is a fantasy that Michel DeCerteau calls the ‘totalizing eye’ and Donna Haraway calls ‘the God Trick’.” (src)

Achieving truth-to-nature through a visual representation seems like a problem of expertise (the doctor must know what a healthy hip bone looks like in order to notice what is unusual or what aspects of a hip bone are missing from the X-ray), perspective, self-surveillance (when selecting the data to be captured), and of interpretation (to analyze aesthetic and moral faculties when making judgement).

So how do we make up our understanding of the world today, then? How do our understandings differ? What does “scientific objectivity” look like when every individual has the capacity to be their own expert, have their own perspective, and draw their own conclusions?

One approach to exploring these questions could be to create an interface that would let users explore a given dataset themselves. I’m drawn to geospatial data aggregated by satellites because the prospect of visualizing physical phenomena much, much larger than us is a very concrete way of illustrating the “god trick” and how the technologies that give us this “view from nowhere” are a massive infrastructural network full of complexity that can only be understood holistically.

Idea 2:

I’m also interested in the idea of cultural memory and how modern media affects our understanding of the present. The content feed and attention economics have been focal points for me. What is our relationship to the past in a landscape constantly feeding us the “now”? What are the aesthetics and politics of infinite distraction and relentless forgetting? I want to attempt to uncover our current cultural zeitgeist and explore current archival nightmares, for example:

“because of the speed of events, there is a real danger that an online phenomenon will already have disappeared before a critical discourse reflecting on it has had the time to mature and establish itself as institutionally recognized knowledge.” (src)

For this idea I’m thinking of making some sort of immersive feed experience similar to Akira Wakita’s INFOTUBE (and probably many other works) but with a focus on the passage of time (performative?) and the contents’ subject matter moreso than a speculative exercise in information architecture.