Tanspositions: Artistic Data Exploration

The research project investigates the possibility of generating new auditory and visual forms based on the analysis and mathematical transformation of scientific data. In addition, the project studies whether and how these new forms are of scientific significance by asking the collaborating researchers to scientifically analyze the artistic outputs. By remaining true to the data while employing an artistic working method and, thus, by combining scientific and artistic values, the project contributes to the conceptual development of a space for research that is shared between art and science. This, however, implies that during the project both scientists and artists will be challenged to work in ways that are unfamiliar to them, either through confrontation with complex artistic interpretations of data or through exposure to very specific scientific working methods. On a meta-level, the project will report on the types of interactions that are deemed to be of value to either the artists, the scientists or both. At present, scientists use a variety of sonification and visualization procedures to analyse and communicate their findings. For artists, those representations are often of little artistic value since they are geared towards a transparent communication of the data creating little space for artistic interventions. Conversely, by foregrounding aesthetic effects, the expanding field of artistic data sonification and visualization runs the risk of producing art works that only superficially related back to the scientific research from which the data originated. While giving the arts an important role in the communication of scientific activity, the artistic exploration of scientific data may thus add very little to the research itself. Given the ever-increasing amount and importance of data representations, it is of particular importance that artists become engaged with their fabrication and to identify how in spite of their very different constitution aesthetic and epistemic research aims may support each other. Three case studies from different scientific fields provide data to be transposed by the artists into artistic outputs, which are in turn analysed by the scientists. The artists have an established practice in music composition and visual art, respectively, and have been collaborating very productively for the last 3 years. Given the transdisciplinary nature of the artistic collaboration it is possible to investigate issues of intermediality not only between art and science but also from within the arts. The process of creation and analysis is continuously exposed on the Research Catalogue online platform while a number of performances/exhibitions make the outputs tangible to the scientists and the general public.

The research project Transpositions: Artistic Data Exploration succeeded in working artistically with structures hidden in scientific data. Resulting art works were presented in exhibitions, performances, videos, an art catalogue and on the Internet; their significance was discussed in symposia and a scholarly publication involving both scientists and artists as well as theorists of science and art. In making those art works the team discovered that these data structures actually consist of complex layers of traces inscribed by the object of investigation as well as the investigative apparatus itself. While the art works were not always meaningful to the scientists, who were mostly interested in specific sets of traces, the works nevertheless showed a coherence and logic familiar to the scientists also since many of the mathematical transformations and statistical analyses were appropriated and adapted from scientific methodologies. This produced an aesthetic experience of the data beyond mere visualisation and sonification, which could artistically be shaped and amplified to highlight important aspects, such as redundancy, delay, structural similarity and relationality. These emergent characteristics, moreover, influenced the very constitution of the art events exhibitions of responsive and interactive installations that exercised the behavior of the data; an experimental art catalogue operating like a paper storage device as well as a flip book; the symposia organized to create a fluid, collaborative concert of interdependent voices etc. rendering these artistic outputs formally unique and artistically original. Evidencing the research in this way, the research project proposed novel modes in which artistic practice can be exposed as research. In those cases where scientists found patterns meaningful to them, data analysis errors could be corrected or open questions could be formulated. Furthermore, the project developed the notion of transposition into a methodologically relevant concept through texts on its website as well as contributions to an edited, scholarly publication. This lead to the understanding that transpositions are essential to artistic as much as scientific research, or as the historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger put it in his contribution, there is one gesture that is common to all [guises of scientific practice]: transposition. Building on such common roots, the research project was nevertheless able to highlight clear differences proposing modes of transdisciplinary collaborations based on informed transpositions from one context or discipline into another.