The Future of Science Visualization is in the Arts
01.2—Technology is advancing. Visualization is not.
Hello and welcome to the inaugural Issue 01.2 of Multitudes.
Written by me, Stephanie Zeller.
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I wanted to start off with something I’m directly involved in: arts in scientific visualization. If you want to read more about my work, check out this in-depth article I wrote about color in big data vis, featured in the August print edition of Eos.
Okay, time to jump in.
Everything is getting more complicated.
Thousands of years before humans created the first orbiting laboratory, allowing a select few to live, work, and witness our perfectly average star envelop in sheets of gold our little blue marble many times per day, year-round, there was Eratosthenes. Born in 276 BCE in Cyrene, Lybia, Eratosthenes not only created a mathematical proof that the earth is round but also accurately measured its circumference. I’ll let Carl Sagan do the explaining:
Eratosthenes used the visual tools at his disposal to inform his mathematical models, resulting in the first (known) convincing round-earth theory—A form, I propose, of scientific visualization.
The familiar, modern definition of this term is primarily used in reference to computer models. Applications range from simulating gravitational waves to advanced terrain satellite imaging to bar charts of daily COVID-19 infection rates. Though advanced computing has made such methodologies much more accessible and economically practical for examining hypotheses and drawing conclusions, scivis began long before computer science, and has always been far more expansive.
The roots of scientific visualization are in the visual arts. From antiquity through the renaissance and into the 1960s, non-digital forms of visualization provided not only reference and standardization for activities like measurement and comparison but also deep, complex visual communication.
Cave paintings describing hunting strategies, sculptures of Roman deities (a contemporary explanation of natural phenomena), humanist-precipitated, geometry-dependent natural scenes of the 1500s (documenting natural rock formations and landscapes), Leonardo’s extensive anatomical drawings and the first-ever aerial map on record, W.E.B Du Bois’ gorgeously executed information visualizations of Black America in the early 1900s.
Da Vinci’s was a period of growth for Western cultures, when mapping, sketching, painting, chemistry, engineering and naturalism were bound up together. His artistic expertise leant perspective and creativity to his practice—two elements necessary, in some form, to scientific progress.
The products of his work—Virgin of the Rocks, for example—communicate a plexus of ideas, emotions, stolid traditions, and morality, coeval with emerging philosophies of science and mathematics at the time: perspective, realism, geography, geology, and the earth generally as an object of serious study.
Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci, 1483-1486, Louvre, Paris
Such is the strength and core of art: the power to convey not mere ideas, concepts, allegories, or even beauty, but the depths of these things and more intersecting with the human experience, the personal lived truth of containing multitudes.
Much has changed in the 530 or so years since Da Vinci, but primarily in tools, not in concept. According to Ray Kurzweil’s extended view of Moore’s Law, we are at the knee of an advancing curve, the change so rapid we can see the doubling in potential by decade. The way we do science has changed—everything is data-driven, and that data is growing in size and complexity.
This growth both reflects and perpetuates the rapid accretion of new ideas. As Moore’s law predicts, everything is getting smaller, faster, and more complicated.
My grandfather never went to college and taught himself everything he needed to know. He kept bookshelves lined with how-to guides and atlases and engineering prospectus and many types of cameras. He built his own HAM radio. The proverbial black box was a manual oil change, a jerry-rigged TV antenna, a flight to the moon in a tin can.
A common body of knowledge concerning the mechanisms of daily life and personal physics existed or could be explained. This time has passed, yet our primary modes of communicating increasingly difficult topics to increasingly disparate knowledge-holders remain similar through the decades.
Visualization today must compress evermore tremendous amounts of information for digestion, analysis, and communication of results. It must cut through thick biases, penetrate disinformation, and present clear conclusions to a general public with an attention span of < 2 seconds. Rushing to define neat categories for specialized study, we discarded traditionalism and materiality—deeply familiar modes of expressing meaning—and turned entirely to computing for standardization.
This standardization has stripped a formerly robust use of multi-sensory visual vocabularies down to hyper-saturated hues, limited glyphs, cluttered graphs and charts, and essentially unreadable figures, all on a 2D digital interface. The scientific community has grown used to this limited vocabulary, compensating for intuition with habitual exposure in paper after paper. But a public drifting further from STEM engagement in lockstep with its growing complexity and lack of accessibility does not have the tools to make these adjustments.
There is an irony in science done on humanity’s behalf, delivered without humanity in mind.
Immanuel Kant, in his seminal work Critique of Judgement, laid out a treatise for art’s place in society. (Versions of his views have appeared in the works of others, such as Albert Camus, who’s essays The Artist in His Time and Create Dangerously have been especially influential on my personal approach to art-making).
Kant lays out two forms of thought: the rational and the aesthetic. Rational thought includes self-evident truths known to the individual as part of the human experience—beliefs, emotions, perceptions and memories intransmissible in their entirety to any other human being.
We can never express the fullness and richness of individual existence, as doing so would require a physical manifestation to bridge the gap between consciousnesses in our tangible world. (This concept was later molded into a much more significant framework for living in De Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, a personal favorite). The closest thing we have, according to Kant, is art.
Art produces affect in a viewer when an artist has managed, through aesthetic thought and action, to create an object, sound, or otherwise tangible and intentional experience that transcends its facticity, as Sartre might say. This experience is an asymptotic approach to expressing the fullness of rational thought, narrowing the gulf. (Kant maintains, however, that art remains the shadows in Plato’s cave compared to the true forms of rational thought).
The methodology of accomplishing this “transcendence” in fine art is steeped in centuries of experimentation and practice, as is true with empirical science. However, we are quickly approaching a critical point in technological advancement when communicating the essence of a body of research will move from concrete to ineffable.
This shift, perhaps subtle for the moment, has already begun to erode the ability of individuals to act as responsible citizens, particularly in a market economy. As the rise of explanatory journalism has proffered, information is power, but it remains a foundation of sand without a depth of understanding.
This understanding, mediated by artists, can be promoted throughout the visualization process—from initial, exploratory analysis all the way to publishing and even a bit of public relations, in terms of disseminating results to the press, who in turn share those findings with the general public.
Integrating artists at every step provides expansive benefits not only for communication but also for the scientists on the “back-end.” Color use, artifact generation, video creation, design, UI/UX, paper writing (esoteric language is not, in fact, an indicator of better research), poetry, VR, AR, broader impact materials, exhibitions, innovative communication methods (data physicalization and public art, for example), sculptural perspectives, sound design, and footholds for semantic connection are just a few examples.
Images from the project Sculpting Visualizations, with which I’m involved. Artists craft glyphs from clay, 3D scan them, then apply color, size, and directionality. The resulting visualization is usable in VR and allows scientists to parse highly complex, multivariate data, such as the biogeochemistry of the Gulf of Mexico (right).
When I raise these arguments, inevitably I run into the “objectivity” condemnation—many fear that involving artists means relinquishing stringent empirical methods across the board, as if a middle ground doesn’t exist. This is summarily incorrect, and is actually a larger argument that deserves its own article, which I plan to write in the future.
I want to emphasize here the significant difference between artists as researchers and co-authors, participating in the work, and “sciart.” I am not advocating for the latter. Certainly, aesthetic illustrations of synapses, paintings of galaxies, well-designed charts or cutesy stainless steel necklaces in the molecular configuration of serotonin are good for science as a whole. We are engaged by beautiful things, which means we’re paying attention—the first step in science communication.
However, engagement does not automatically beget profound, transcendent comprehension or connection. In fact, promoting art’s contributions to science as purely topical, like window dressing for the gargantuan structure that is exhaustive empirical research, is not only harmful to our perception of these cultural necessities—it’s insulting to the vigor of those fields and limiting to those who wish to contribute more concretely.
A final meditation on Kant’s aesthetic thought reveals that, in his view (and in mine), art is not merely a presentation of aesthetic objects or experiences, but one which will “set the imagination and understanding into a harmony,” creating the conditions for a kind of pleasurable, self-sustaining transcendent connection. The kick of dopamine you feel when you reach an “ah-ha!” moment, and everything is clear as crystal and fully beautiful.
Hi there! Thanks for reading. If you like what I’m doing here, you should tell your friends. If you’re interested in keeping up with me, you can find me on Twitter @StellerZeller, or on Instagram, @stellerz.