This thesis provides an intellectual context for my work in computational
scientific visualization for large-scale public outreach in venues such as digitaldome
planetarium shows and high-definition public television documentaries. In
my associated practicum, a DVD that provides video excerpts, 1 focus especially on
work I have created with my Advanced Visualization Laboratory team at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (Champaign, Illinois) from
2002-2007.
1 make three main contributions to knowledge within the field of computational
scientific visualization. Firstly, I share the unique process 1 have pioneered for
collaboratively producing and exhibiting this data-driven art when aimed at popular
science education. The message of the art complements its means of production:
Renaissance Team collaborations enact a cooperative paradigm of evolutionary
sympathetic adaptation and co-creation.
Secondly, 1 open up a positive, new space within computational scientific
visualization's practice for artistic expression—especially in providing a theory of
digi-epistemology that accounts for how this is possible given the limitations
imposed by the demands of mapping numerical data and the computational models
derived from them onto visual forms. I am concerned not only with liberating
artists to enrich audience's aesthetic experiences of scientific visualization, to
contribute their own vision, but also with conceiving of audiences as co-creators of
the aesthetic significance of the work, to re-envision and re-circulate what they
encounter there. Even more commonly than in the age of traditional media, on-line
social computing and digital tools have empowered the public to capture and
repurpose visual metaphors, circulating them within new contexts and telling new
stories with them.
Thirdly, I demonstrate the creative power of visaphors (see footnote, p. 1) to
provide novel embodied experiences through my practicum as well as my thesis
discussion. Specifically, I describe how the visaphors my Renaissance Teams and I
create enrich the Environmentalist Story of Science, essentially promoting a
counter-narrative to the Enlightenment Story of Science through articulating how
humanity participates in an evolving universal consciousness through our embodied
interaction and cooperative interdependence within nested, self-producing
(autopoetic) systems, from the micro- to the macroscopic. This contemporary
account of the natural world, its inter-related systems, and their dynamics may be
understood as expressing a creative and generative energy—a kind of
consciousness-that transcends the human yet also encompasses it
