Burning List

José Luis de Vicente is a Barcelona-based researcher, curator and writer cultivating several idiosyncratic pockets of digital culture. Director of the Visualizar program at Medialab-Prado (Madrid), Vicente has been showcasing a variety of exciting new media work for the last decade. He’s been involved with an impressive range of curatorial projects that include the Machines and Souls exhibit (2008) at the Reina Sofia National Museum and experimental interfaces such as The Atlas of Electromagnetic Space (produced in collaboration with Irma Vilà and Bestiario).

I met Vicente last year at Visualizar’08 and it was immediately apparent that his thinking about visualization and “data practice” was several years ahead of the curve. I was excited to discover that the imminent edition of Visualizar revolved around public data and I definitely recommend that anybody within striking distance of Madrid consider applying to be a collaborator on one of the selected projects that will be prototyped in a month. Over the last few weeks, Vicente and I had the following exchange which delved into his experience with arts programming, his assessment of the current interest in visualization and the optimism intrinsic to the open data movement.

[Visualizar'08 Exhibition / photo: Medialab-Prado]

Greg J. Smith: The original edition of Visualizar (2007) acknowledged visualization as means of representing and understanding the massive data sets associated with “scientific and social processes”. That definition certainly spoke to the utility of visualization and the excitement around the discipline at that moment, but I’m wondering if you can provide some context on how the Visualizar project came to be? I know you have an extensive background with curating and festival programming, how exactly does Visualizar relate to and extend out your past work with ArtFutura, Sónar and OFFF?

José Luis de Vicente: Before Visualizar, in my position curating for different new media festivals I had already touched upon the emerging work of a generation of designers and artists that were creating very exciting projects proposing innovative strategies for the representation of complexity.

For instance, this was one of the main elements in Randonnée, an exhibition I curated along with Oscar Abril and Andy Davies for Sónar 2005, including work by Jonathan Harris, Ben Fry, Martin Wattenberg, and a commission by Ben Cerveny—today at Stamen. Most of these artists had also being featured as speakers at the OFFF Festival, that I co-curated between 2005 and 2007. OFFF was a good context to start focusing on Visualization as a language and we also did some hands-on work there, like the advanced Processing workshop that we hosted at Hangar (Barcelona) in 2006. But I was interested in finding an institution with a stronger research-oriented orientation, where we could be productive raising some questions about the potential of Visualization in different contexts, like art, journalism or activism, and launch new projects.

Luckily the perfect occasion appeared in late 2006 in a conversation with Marcos Garcia (head of activities at Medialab-Prado), while I was hosting an evening of presentations at the ArtFutura festival around data aesthetics. A year earlier, Medialab-Prado had started developing a format of workshops with several interesting characteristics: international calls for ideas and collaborators, that would enroll in open, non-hierarchical teams working very intensively for two weeks, in an environment that would encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, and with the assistance of renowned artists. This was the formula they had used with great success in their Interactivos? program of workshops, and Marcos was thinking about applying it to other fields of practice. We both agreed that Visualization could be a great topic for this, and we were specially keen on bringing on board people with very different backgrounds and abilities. The teams that have worked on the previous two editions of Visualizar have included not only artists, designers and programmers, but also statisticians, computer scientists, journalists, architects… so we are really happy with that.

The parallel discussion to your curatorial/organizational experience is what visualization projects have affected and inspired you the most? What were some game changers for you personally?

I have a soft spot for projects that allow you to “manipulate” planes of reality that were previously inaccessible. A personal favourite is of course Josh On’s They Rule (pictured above). Something that interests me a lot about this project is how it helps to locate a certain kind of visualization projects culturally. They Rule to me is not important as a functional tool (the data it presents is by definition outdated, and there are important aspects of the system it surveys that it is unable to convey). However, it perfectly explains how a particular system operates.

I have always found there is something particularly touching about Jonathan Harris’ We Feel Fine. The project is not only technically outstanding and very spectacular from a design point of view, but it also generates very different responses in people. Some celebrate its capacity to create an intimate model of communication, others find it appalling because it highlights a shallow kind of exhibitionism.

Laura Krugman’s One Million Dollar Blocks is also a great example of the power of visualization as part of a certain kind of social research that has important implications.

[Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey / Bicycle Built For 2,000 / 2009]

And lately I have enjoyed a lot Aaron Koblin’s projects, from The Sheep Market to Bicycle for 2,000, where a question is posed and the data to explore that question is generated from scratch by a collective of participants that are never aware of the global picture.

The theme for Visualizar’09 is “Public Data”, and the workshop dials right into the burgeoning desire for transparent governance, policy-making and open research. One of the things that struck me about your call for work was that you are not only seeking out projects, designers and scholars, but databases – organizations can share their data sets as potential “raw material” for the workshop. Given the broad scope of this endeavour how is organizing this upcoming Visualizar different than the previous editions?

Every edition builds upon what we have learned in the previous one, and since last year we had a very strong interest in starting to collect datasets as part of the process of preparing the workshop, with the idea of making them available to the teams at the beginning of the process.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first one is practical; one of the first questions the teams working on the projects have to answer is, do we have access to the data we need to follow this line of inquiry, or does that data even exist? Sometimes getting access to the data is the more difficult part of the process and takes a good chunk of their time; other times, in the scope of two weeks it is simply impossible. Having the datasets available could help them to focus on conceptualization and development faster, even if it means changing their initial idea – which in most cases tends to change anyway.

[photo: Medialab-Prado]

The second reason is related to the bigger goals of the Visualizar project. One of them is supporting open data initiatives and promoting the right of citizens to access and use datasets that are generated by public processes and paid with public resources. Medialab-Prado is a public institution that is part of a City Council department, so encouraging other departments of the City of Madrid to make their data available and help us to do interesting things with them is of great interest to us. Also, as Fernanda Viégas (pictured above) from Many Eyes said in her talk at the first Visualizar, the use of data visualization as a popular form for social communication is only feasible if access to data is sorted out first. In a way, the fate of dataviz is connected to the success of open data and open government initiatives.

Or, maybe the fate of “widespread” dataviz is connected to open data. Right now we have “experts” that have the time, funding or institutional affiliations to negotiate access to databases but maybe in several years an average high school science class could access the same information. Given your past experience as an activist/organizer for free and open source culture what do think the public has to gain from open data? Is this just another iteration of the question of copyright and intellectual property that we’re used to hearing about, or is it something new?

Part of it extends the argument of the open source movement of course, specifically that which deals with the importance of having open alternatives to proprietary systems. Initiatives like OpenStreetMap have been groundbreaking in arguing that for every dataset it is crucially important in many applications for there to be an open, nonproprietary alternative.

Another key point is defending that resources of general interest that have been funded with public money should be accessible to the public. Some prominent global organizations still charge a lot of money, for instance, for global development data. It is important for many reasons that this kind of data is accessible.

Finally, the notion of open government has been an important factor in the discussions around open data. The idea that governmental transparency will be facilitated by providing public access to as much data generated by government has been the most encouraging sign about the contemporary idea of open data.

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