Phototrails is a series of data visualisations revealing the mark each individual leaves on the Internet via their posts on the social networking platform Instagram, and the collective effect of every individual’s post on a “spatial and temporal level”.

Visualisations of Instagram photos uploaded within the specific territorial spaces

Art-Science fusion 

Data visualisation has been largely associated with the sciences, with notable milestones including the Human Genome Project  and the advent of chemical  imaging.

Manovich notes that while his tool is provided by the sciences, he wields it with an artistic purpose, thereby “painting with data”:

“We also have to use the same kind of charts and labels because it’s almost like a standard language used by science. But as an artist I am also interested in the question of how can I present the world through the data…Thinking about landscape paintings in Impressionism, Fauvism, or even Cubism, how could I represent nature today through the contributions of millions of people? So I think of myself as an artist who is painting with data. “

A montage (artistic technique) of data (scientific stuff)

Manovich also critiques the journalistic interpretation of data as the absolute truth:

“I’m basically trying to say that as opposed to a journalist who thinks about the “data” as a kind of truth, that it’s a way to find out what happened, what I’m thinking about is its own reality… It’s not a question of truth, it’s a question of making interesting connections.”

As a journalism student, this insight is especially captivating for me. A journalist is essentially a “data miner”, going out into the thick of the action to collect as many numbers, witness testimonies, photographs and sound bytes as we can – data which eventually determines the news angle. Manovich however, questions the assumption that data is objective, and instead proposes a new way of looking at data: from a macro perspective to form connections rather than to draw conclusions.

Technical realisation

I am intrigued by Manovich’s choice of Instagram as a repository of photo data. I initially thought that it was probably because Instagram has the richest collection of photographs, which would produce aesthetically-appealing visualisations. But through this week’s reading, realised that he is in fact motivated by the urge to democratise photojournalism:

“When popular media covers exceptional events such as social upheavals, revolutions, and protests, typically they just show you a few professionally shot photographs… Instagram has its own biases and it’s definitely not a transparent window into reality, but would give us, let’s say, a more democratic picture. “

The avoidance of Facebook and Twitter are also intentional, for Manovich was mindful that the uneven power distribution on these platforms would distort the data he obtains:

“We chose Instagram, specifically, because it was not an active tool for citizen journalism. Rather, it was used by a much smaller number of people. It wasn’t dominated by a few power users or by a few voices. “

The software Manovich and his team use is ImagePlot, which you can download for free here (hurray for open source software!!! It takes pretty long to download though). The techniques involved in creating the visualisations are also made transparent on here.

Open source culture

I am really inspired by Manovich’s creative exploration of the subjectivity of data through Phototrails, and am grateful that the thought processes and technicalities have been documented in such a transparent manner.

The visualisation techniques are clearly documented for everyone to understand

Like the hacker culture of the pre-Microsoft days, the data visualisation culture is approaching, if not already experiencing, its heyday. I find it absolutely amazing that data visualisation artists and scientists are largely working in an open-source environment right now, with the data-mining software and apps freely available for anyone. This is the ideal environment to generate innovative and thought-provoking data visualisation pieces that could fundamentally change the way we think and work.

However, I also have this fear that someday, the art/science of data visualisation will be commodified, and that the open source culture will be replaced by tech giants enforcing their proprietorship of data mining tools.

Is this just another irrational fear of mine? I sincerely hope so.