The Representation and Navigation of Complex Data

In this paper we are attempting to address issues related to perception and consciousness deriving from the management of overwhelming data, utilizing artistic/design and sound production practices in virtual reality/environments. In the ordinary flow of day to day activities the self descriptive, self-reflexive, and recursive processes of data collection reveal themselves. These pairs are not encountered as binary oppositions in conflict, but in a continual management of data transformation. We converge with our own solutions “ and the development of technological tools “ and give birth to new scientific tools as well as intuitively artistically generated tools, literally and figuratively. A system prototype - “Vineta” - has been developed at the IPP allowing navigation through scientific and technical data without typing and revising keyword-based queries. The chosen approach to visualizing documents and terms in navigational retrieval includes the representation of documents and terms as graphical objects, and dynamic positioning of these objects in a 3-dimensional virtual navigation space. Users can navigate through this virtual space examining individual documents and clusters of documents at various levels of detail