The monotype as a distinctive form: A practice-led investigation into how the monotype can deliver affect

This practice-led research project investigates the monotype as a distinctive form, and one which has been hitherto somewhat under-regarded and given relatively little theoretical analysis or interpretive attention from the perspective of the studio practitioner. This research leads me to investigate distinctive formal, material and perceptual qualities of the monotype process, which are conducive to metaphoric associations appropriate to my themes of memory, space and time, through the generation of affect. Both the monotype and affect are realised in in-between spaces. The monotype emerges from exchanges that take place between iterations of drawings, painting and printing, and the images that result are influenced and transformed by these exchanges. Throughout the project I explore and analyse resonances between the qualities of the monotype and the characteristics of the concepts of phenomenology and affect. My research is informed by the writings of: Antonio Damasio and Siri Hustvedt on affect, phenomenology and memory; Brian Massumi on affect; Henri Lefebvre on space, time and rhythm; Tim Ingold on linear interconnectedness; John Berger on drawing and process; François Jullien on the Chinese tradition; the philosophy of Elizabeth Grosz, and Thomas Middlemost on the monotype in Australia. In creating several series of monotypes involving expressive and intuitive gestural imagery, and qualities of luminosity and rhythm resonant with my lived experience, I have been influenced by artists past and present. These include Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, John Constable, Paul Cezanne, Sidney Nolan, Georg Baselitz, Cy Twombly, Ken Whisson, Elisabeth Cummings, and Chinese ink and brush painters. I reflect on the qualities of immersiveness, between-ness, tactility, spontaneity and the intuitive expression of personal experience, as qualities intrinsic to the monotype, and essential to my project’s aim for the delivery of affect. I further explore the relations of composition to pictorial space, of figure to ground, distinctive to the monotype. The accompanying exegesis charts the course of my discoveries with the affectively engaging monotype as I create expressions of my lived experiences through the themes of familial relations, our relations to place and to our natural environments, and to the life of the studio. While I began with a sense of these themes as leading my project, the monotype process became, in a sense, the true subject matter of my research. While I absorbed and filtered my own bodily experiences of the world, my engagement with the monotype process became a significantly transformative one, an exploration of multiple states though the various iterations of an image, and a process of imbuing images with metaphysical resonance

The State-of-the-Art of Set Visualization

Sets comprise a generic data model that has been used in a variety of data analysis problems. Such problems involve analysing and visualizing set relations between multiple sets defined over the same collection of elements. However, visualizing sets is a non-trivial problem due to the large number of possible relations between them. We provide a systematic overview of state-of-the-art techniques for visualizing different kinds of set relations. We classify these techniques into six main categories according to the visual representations they use and the tasks they support. We compare the categories to provide guidance for choosing an appropriate technique for a given problem. Finally, we identify challenges in this area that need further research and propose possible directions to address these challenges. Further resources on set visualization are available at http://www.setviz.net

The Role of Design in Picturebooks: Meaning, Image-Making & Typography

This thesis investigates the role of design in producing unique experiences through the medium of contemporary picturebooks. The nature of the picturebooks format, in which text and image are combined, lends itself well to a design analysis. Furthermore, examining picturebooks through the lens of design adds a critical new perspective to current work in the field. Award-winning picturebooks were selected for a visual analysis, focusing on the formal elements, design principles, and compositions of the books and their affect on the meaning of the text and the readers experience of the visual narrative. Additionally, through a series of design experiments, the relationships between typography and imagery in picturebooks is explored. Through this research, this project investigates the designed form of the picturebook and the impact of design decisions on the overall visual narrative. This research demonstrates how the careful consideration of design principles can inform and benefit the process of creating picturebooks, and could lead to more practitioners in the field adopting a design-oriented approach to picturebooks

3D visualisation of the laetoli footprints on the internet

Bibliography: p. 84-86

Some approaches to representing sound with colour and shape

In recent times much of the practice of musical notation and representation has begun a gradual migration away from the monochrome standard that existed since the emergence of printed Non-Western music in the 16th century, towards the full colour pallet afforded by modern printers and computer screens. This move has expanded the possibilities available for the representation of information in the musical score. Such an expansion is arguably necessitated by the growth of new musical techniques favouring musical phenomena that were previously poorly captured by traditional Western musical notation. As time-critical form of visualisation there is a strong imperative for the musical score to employ symbols that signify sonic events and the method of their execution with maximal efficiency. One important goal in such efficiency is “semantic soundness”: the degree to which graphical representations makes inherent sense to the reader. This paper explores the implications of recent research into cross-modal colour-to-sound and shape-to sound mappings for the application of colour and shape in musical scores. The paper also revisits Simon Emmerson’s Super-Score concept as a means to accommodate multiple synchronised forms of sonic representation (the spectrogram and spectral descriptors for example) together with alternative notational approaches (gestural, action-based and graphical for example) in a single digital document

Faceted Views of Varying Emphasis (FaVVEs): a framework for visualising multi-perspective small multiples

Many datasets have multiple perspectives – for example space, time and description – and often analysts are required to study these multiple perspectives concurrently. This concurrent analysis becomes difficult when data are grouped and split into small multiples for comparison. A design challenge is thus to provide representations that enable multiple perspectives, split into small multiples, to be viewed simultaneously in ways that neither clutter nor overload. We present a design framework that allows us to do this. We claim that multi-perspective comparison across small multiples may be possible by superimposing perspectives on one another rather than juxtaposing those perspectives side-by-side. This approach defies conventional wisdom and likely results in visual and informational clutter. For this reason we propose designs at three levels of abstraction for each perspective. By flexibly varying the abstraction level, certain perspectives can be brought into, or out of, focus. We evaluate our framework through laboratory-style user tests. We find that superimposing, rather than juxtaposing, perspective views has little effect on performance of a low-level comparison task. We reflect on the user study and its design to further identify analysis situations for which our framework may be desirable. Although the user study findings were insufficiently discriminating, we believe our framework opens up a new design space for multi-perspective visual analysis

Examining the Impact of Provenance-Enabled Media on Trust and Accuracy Perceptions

In recent years, industry leaders and researchers have proposed to use technical provenance standards to address visual misinformation spread through digitally altered media. By adding immutable and secure provenance information such as authorship and edit date to media metadata, social media users could potentially better assess the validity of the media they encounter. However, it is unclear how end users would respond to provenance information, or how to best design provenance indicators to be understandable to laypeople. We conducted an online experiment with 595 participants from the US and UK to investigate how provenance information altered users' accuracy perceptions and trust in visual content shared on social media. We found that provenance information often lowered trust and caused users to doubt deceptive media, particularly when it revealed that the media was composited. We additionally tested conditions where the provenance information itself was shown to be incomplete or invalid, and found that these states have a significant impact on participants' accuracy perceptions and trust in media, leading them, in some cases, to disbelieve honest media. Our findings show that provenance, although enlightening, is still not a concept well-understood by users, who confuse media credibility with the orthogonal (albeit related) concept of provenance credibility. We discuss how design choices may contribute to provenance (mis)understanding, and conclude with implications for usable provenance systems, including clearer interfaces and user education.Comment: Accepted to CSCW 202