Beyond Data Visualization: Data Collection in Art Practice and Art Education
Contemporary culture increasingly looks to big data and its associated algorithms to inform scientific, medical, and behavioral decisions. Data visualization has emerged as a standard tool in journalistic and academic fields. Typically, visualization specialists are brought in after data collection is complete to generate dazzling graphics. This approach perpetuates the disunion between humanities-based and science-based practices outlined by Ginzburg (1980), Elkins (2008), and other historians.
Our presentation explores the potential for expanding art practice and art classroom investigations to include data collection as well as representation. Recent works recording and representing meteorological and climatic events will be presented within the context of contemporary art practice. Theoretical assumptions of data-based science will be reviewed with an eye toward conceptually grounding a hybrid practice. The author will present data-based sculptural investigations of rainfall and wind to demonstrate that combining data collection and experiential art can bring insight to our understanding of the environment in ways that each medium alone cannot. Measurement and quantitative analysis are powerful tools for understanding the particular as well as the universal. Finally, potential future paths for arts practitioners working with data independently and through collaboration in professional practice and education will be evaluated.
MFA Candidate
Stanford University
Cy Keener is fascinated by the abstract facets of the natural world. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest and was fortunate to regularly venture onto the snow-capped peaks and sun-warmed ridges of the Cascade Range at an impressionable age. He holds a BA in Classics and Philosophy from Colorado College, am MArch from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently an MFA in Fine Art candidate at Stanford University. Keener is most comfortable at the installation scale, coaxing wood, metal, and fabric into immersive environments. He has originated installations for the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas, El Paso; and Suyama Space in Seattle. He is currently focused on gaining conversational fluency in atmospheric science and remote-sensing networks through Stanford’s Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering.
