Data driven drawings

• Main Author: González Jiménez, Juan Camilo
• Other Authors: Sorensen Dorrit Vibeke
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Visual arts and music::Drawing, design and illustration; DRNTU::Science::Mathematics::Applied mathematics::Data visualization; DRNTU::Visual arts and music::Animation; DRNTU::Visual arts and music::General::Social aspects
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/106573; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/47992
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This practice led doctorate investigates the potential of artistic representations that express subjective views derived from traumatic personal experiences, using a series of impersonal datasets relating to acts of violence in Colombia as the point of origin. This investigation is led by a series of animated projects of my own creation in which I utilized data that contextually relates to deeply personal events that affected my life, seeking to build a defense for the subjective experience to permeate and inform the representation of data. These artistic projects seek to interrogate complex experiences that indicate unresolved states of mind in constant states of flux, leveraging the potential of data to be an index of phenomena with these characteristics. Relevant theoretical research that contextualizes these works has been conducted to elucidate contrasting arguments for the potential of representing data either as an expression of these complexities to allow for clearer reasoning or the opposing view that investigates the re-presentation of the complex and the limitless as states where reason becomes forestalled. The first chapter contextualizes artistic data representation and examines the role of subjectivity in it. The second chapter proposes a connection between data visualization and the tradition of graphic notations in music and animation to study a point of intersection between functional data visualization and artistic practice. The third chapter examines in more detail the contrasting arguments for approaching data representation. Once the theoretical proposal for subjectivity in data representation is established, chapter 4 discussed my own practical work as an embodiment of it. Formally and aesthetically Data Driven Drawings investigate the possibilities and affordances of animation to develop temporal articulations of data, in order to explore the mutating flux of underlying themes that motivate artistic projects. The practice and theory are interwoven to create a single unified argument for the notion of Data Driven Drawings presented here.