postmodern criticism (ip*)

Along with a Graphical User Interface, a database, navigable space and simulation, dynamic paradigms such as chaos and complexity theories, and artificial life. It also forms the basis of a new field of scientific visualisation. Modern medicine relies on the visualisation of the body and its functioning. Similarly, modern biology depends on DNA and protein visualisation. But while contemporary pure and applied sciences, from mathematics and physics to biology and medicine heavily rely on data visualisation, until recently visualisation in the cultural sphere has been used on a much more limited scale, being confined to 2D graphs and charts in the financial section of a newspaper, or on occasional 3D visualisation on television to illustrate the trajectory of a space station or missile. I will use the term visualisation for the situations when quantified data which by itself is not visual – the output of meteorological sensors, stock market behaviours, the set of addresses describing the trajectory of a message through a computer network, and so on – is transformed into a visual representation. [2] The concept of mapping is closely related to visualisation but it makes sense to keep the two separate. By representing all data using the same numerical code, computers make it easy to map one representation into another: grayscale image into 3D surface, a sound wave into an image (think of visualisers in music players such as iTunes), and so on. Visualisation can then be thought of as a particular subset of mapping in which a data set is mapped into an image. Human culture practically never uses more than four dimensions in its representations because we humans live in 4D space. It is therefore difficult to imagine data in more than these four dimensions: three dimensions of space (X, Y, Z) and time. However, more often than not, the data sets we want to represent have more than four dimensions. In such situations designers and their clients have to choose which dimensions to use and which to omit, and how to map the selected dimensions. This is the new politics of mapping of computer culture. Who has the power to decide what kind of mapping to use? Which dimensions are selected? What kind of interface is provided for the user? These new questions about data mapping are now as important as more traditional questions about the politics of media representation, by now well rehearsed in cultural criticism (who is represented and how, who is omitted). More precisely, these new questions around the politics of quantified data representation run parallel to the questions about the content of the iconic and narrative media representations. In the later case, we usually deal with the visual images of people, countries and ethnicity, in the former case, the images are abstract 3D animations, 3D charts, graphs, and other types of visual representation used for quantified data.