Aesthetic visualization projects that incorporate users, community
stakeholders, multiple modalities and technologies necessarily
emphasize the way that an artistic visualization can be both an
artifact and a process — a conceptualization of aesthetic
visualization that is useful for thinking about visualization in
general. In this paper, the authors propose the concept of
expressivity as a move away from the indexical claims of
visualization and instead towards an acknowledgement of the
entangled nature of social, political, economic, cultural,
technological and environmental actants. Through a description of
the In The Air, Tonight public visualization project, the authors
suggest that by making manifest the connections between these
actants, a visualization project, as a form of expressive
cartography, can contribute to the visibility of and engagement
with important issues (e.g. homelessness) that affect society
