Interactive Style Transfer for Data Visualization and Data Art

This thesis discusses Data Brushes, an interactive web application to explore neural style transfer using models trained on artistic data visualizations. The application invites casual creators to engage with deep convolutional neural networks to co-create custom artworks with a focus on style transfer networks created from canonical and contemporary works of data visualization and data art to demonstrate the versatility and flexibility of the algorithm. In addition to enabling a novel creative workflow, the process of interactively modifying an image via multiple style transfer networks reveals meaningful features encoded within the networks, and provides insight into the effects particular networks have on different images, or different regions within a single image. To evaluate Data Brushes, we gathered expert feedback from participants of a data science symposium and ran an observational study, finding that our application facilitates the creative exploration of neural style transfer for data art and enhances user intuition regarding the expressive range of style transfer features. This thesis explores both the practical uses of such tools for artists as Data Brushes and the interpretive uses of creating such venues for accessibility to computational art, remixing the purpose of data visualizations to be more than just graphical representations of information

Recorridos

Màster de Creació Artística Contemporànea, Facultat de Belles Arts, Universitat de Barcelona, curs: 2016-2017, Tutor: Adolfo Genovart[spa] Este grupo de obra parte desde un punto de partida primordial: el Sol. Con el cuál nace una indagación sobre nuestra conexión con el tiempo y el espacio. Mediante la investigación artística transdiciplinaria se indaga sobre las características de nuestra condición humana contemporánea. Al igual, se busca una conexión entre la tecnología, el diseño y el arte que haga referencia a esta condición. El objetivo de esta búsqueda artística es la exploración de las preguntas: Cual es el espacio/tiempo en el que habitamos? y Cómo nos relacionamos materialmente con este?[eng] This group of work starts from a primordial point of departure: the Sun. Which gives birth to an inquiry about our connection with time and space. Through transdisciplinary artistic research, there is an investigation of the characteristics which define our contemporary human condition. In the same manner, a connection is sought between technology, design and art that makes reference to this condition. The purpose of this artistic search is the exploration into the questions: What is the space/time in which we inhabit? And How do we relate materially to it

NEUVis: Comparing Affective and Effective Visualisation

Data visualisations are useful for providing insight from complex scientific data. However, even with visualisation, scientific research is difficult for non-scientists to comprehend. When developed by designers in collaboration with scientists, data visualisation can be used to articulate scientific data in a way that non-experts can understand. Creating human-centred visualisations is a unique challenge, and there are no frameworks to support their design. In response, this thesis presents a practice-led study investigating design methods that can be used to develop Non-Expert User Visualisations (NEUVis), data visualisations for a general public, and the response that people have to different kinds of NEUVis. For this research, two groups of ten users participated in quantitative studies, informed by Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba’s method of Naturalistic Inquiry, which asked non-scientists to express their cognitive and emotional response to NEUVis using different media. The three different types of visualisations were infographics, 3D animations and an interactive installation. The installation used in the study, entitled 18S rDNA, was developed and evaluated as part of this research using John Zimmerman’s Research Through Design methodology. 18S rDNA embodies the knowledge and design methods that were developed for this research, and provided an opportunity for explication of the entire NEUVis design process. The research findings indicate that developing visualisations for the non-expert audience requires a new process, different to the way scientists visualise data. The result of this research describes how creative practitioners collaborate with primary researchers and presents a new human-centred design thinking model for NEUVis. This model includes two design tools. The first tool helps designers merge user needs with data they wish to visualise. The second tool helps designers take that merged information and begin an iterative, user-centred design process

Articulating Media Arts Activities in Art-Science Contexts

This paper discusses the conflicting expectations for media artists taking part in art-science collaborations. Despite the increasing opportunity to participate in these interdisciplinary projects, it can be unclear how media arts activities are best articulated, or even if they need to be defined at all. Additionally, this paper examines a methodological framework widely used in the visualization community for identifying different visualization tasks within research activities. Inspired by its success, this paper proposes a new methodological framework for media arts activities in art-science contexts. This framework splits media arts activities into overlapping areas: generation, augmentation, provocation and mediation, providing a useful way to articulate the broader importance of media arts in interdisciplinary collaboration

Experiência e atenção : construção e constrição de ecossistemas de média-arte digital

O conceito dos ecossistemas biológicos funciona como metáfora para muitos sistemas complexos, e é utilizado e ampliado no presente estudo para representar as relações nos sistemas social, cultural e artístico, entre agentes envolvidos na criação, investigação, exposição, fruição, experimentação, educação e integração socioeconómica da média-arte digital, dando atenção a aspetos criativos, organizacionais e participativos. Para este trabalho, foi efetuado um percurso de investigação e reflexão, através de experiência direta do autor, mas sempre suportado pela experiência de terceiros, nos seus relatos e reflexões, nos ecossistemas materializados nos festivais de média-arte digital, realizados sobretudo em Portugal, e também através da análise sobre o pensamento contemporâneo, que disseca os mecanismos de controlo, agregação, separação e potenciação relevantes para os ecossistemas de média-arte digital. Esse percurso visa produzir um relato atual, analítico, certamente subjetivo – dado ser baseado em experiências pessoais e análise interpretativa – mas cuja intenção é desvelar mecanismos invisíveis, mas importantes, atuais e atuantes, que afetam as relações entre os vários agentes do ecossistema, a sua relação com os atuais paradigmas socioeconómicos, característicos das gerações ativas, permanentemente conectadas às redes digitais ubíquas: a economia da experiência e a economia da atenção. Num momento em que o centro do ecossistema foi tomado pela economia criativa e os seus agentes – a indústria, as empresas, os espaços de cultura e lazer e até a Academia – e assistindo-se à comoditização da criação e produção artísticas, aqueles paradigmas estão também ligados ao crescimento e popularização dos fenómenos do hacktivismo e o artivismo, que repõem os artistas e as suas obras no centro do ecossistema, reforçando as suas ligações a todo o meio envolvente, quer pelas intervenções a que se propõem, quer pelos questionamentos que levantam. Se porventura alguns desses mecanismos são já bem conhecidos isoladamente, a sua interdependência e interrelacionamento não tinham sido apresentados até ao momento, e produzir novo significado a partir de blocos de conhecimento prévio é um dos objetivos maiores de qualquer investigação.The concept of biological ecosystems is used as a metaphor for many complex systems. In this work it is used and extended to represent relationships in social, cultural and artistic systems, between agents involved in the creation, research, exhibition, enjoyment, experimentation, education and socio-economic integration of digital media art, focusing on creative, organisational and participatory aspects. This work was developed over a journey of research and reflection, through the author’s direct experience, but always supported and inspired by the experience of others, through their writings and visions, and materialised in digital art ecosystems, mainly festivals, carried out in Portugal. It was also developed through the analysis of contemporary thought, dissecting control, aggregation, separation and strengthening mechanisms that are relevant to digital media art ecosystems. This journey’s goal is to elaborate a current, analytical, and certainly subjective account – for it is based on personal experiences and interpretative analysis – with the intent of unveiling invisible yet important, current and active mechanisms, that affect the relationships between the ecosystem agents and their relationship with contemporary socio-economic paradigms, characteristic of the permanently connected generations to ubiquitous digital networks: the experience economy and the attention economy. At a time when the centre of the ecosystem is taken by the creative economy and its agents – industry, business, cultural and leisure spaces and even by Academia – while witnessing the commodification of art creation, those paradigms are also linked to the growth and popularization of hacktivism and artivism, which put back the artists and their works in the centre of the ecosystem, by strengthening their connections to the environment, either by their direct interventions, or by the questions they raise. If some of these mechanisms are already well-known in isolation, their interdependences and interrelationships had not been studied so far, and to produce new meaning from prior knowledge is one of the ultimate objectives of any research