I wanted to let everyone know about my first gallery show which starts at 6pm on Friday (18th November) at the Biscuit Factory – a commercial art gallery in Newcastle. The exhibition will be unusual for the gallery which is predominantly focused on craft based work as my work consists of digital prints of ‘Data Portraits’. Data Portraits are information visualisations consisting of node and link diagrams representing hyperlinks from a given URL. The images make use of force directed graphs to organise the nodes into a pattern where related nodes (i.e. pages with links between them) gravitate together and unrelated nodes spring apart. A series of them can be seen here.As well as being a commercial enterprise the underlying motivation behind Data Portraits is to understand the limits of self representation. It’s intriguing to me that people do identify with these graphics even though they are far removed from what they represent. The notion that a web site is spatial has a long history traced back to the idea of a hyperlink as a means of ‘navigating’ information and we are now surrounded by network graphics on everything from News TV intros to the cover of Computing Textbooks. This is only one possible conceptualisation for what the web it and how it works but it has become of framing our interactions with it and one of the dominant schemas of the 21st century.
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