From Data Realism to Dada Aggregations: Visualizations in Digital Art, Humanities and Popular Culture

The orientation towards data in arts, humanities and pop culture in recent years brings a renewed interest in realism and iconoclasm. The various APIs (Application programming interfaces) and mashups that are employed in these traditionally “qualitative” disciplines offer tools for creative and often critical interpretations. Data are becoming means of a critical distance to the visual and media saturated world that bring whole new perspective on our everyday life and reality. These emerging critical and visual practices define a realism based on data rather than on human perception, reason or some strong ontological theses. This data oriented realism does not simply represent reality but performs the modern processes of its construction with an almost iconoclastic fervor. It offers a distance from the power and seduction of the (digital) image and asks questions about their conditions of possibility, methods of gathering and the various possibilities of their representation. Visualization of various data in the form of popular user generated mashups, serious art visualizations and new digital methods in humanities create a tension between the new forms of iconoclastic realism and the more playful dada collage techniques that are satirical and rather than realist and emancipatory rather than iconoclastic. The use of visualizations in art, humanities and online popular culture (cyberculture) is defined by this tension between data realism to dada “aggregations”.