Friday, October 17, 2008

“Transdisciplines” Lecture Series -5: George Legrady

Aesthetic & Cultural Perspectives Through Data Visualization
November 12, Wednesday, 19:30


Yıldız Technical University, Yıldız Campus, Auditorium
The lecture will be in English with simultaneous Turkish translation. “Transdisciplines” lecture series organized by Garanti Gallery and Platform Garanti continues with George Legrady. The lecture on Aesthetic & Cultural Perspectives Through Data Visualization will take place at 19:30, in the YTU Auditorium on Wednesday 12th November. It is organized with the collaboration of Yıldız Technical University, Faculty of Art and Design, Interactive Media Design Program.

The presentation will trace the intersection of data organization and visualization in a number of the artist's projects such as "Pockets Full of Memories" inaugurated at the Centre Pompidou, and "Making Visible the Invisible" a public arts commission for the Seattle Central Library, and the Cell Tango (Global Collaborative Visual Mapping Archive) visual archive exhibited at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC. These projects consist of visualizations generated by custom designed software that dynamically organize data.


“To activate information is to build knowledge. The aggregate processing of dynamically generated data, with resultant output through visualizations allow for a form of artistic experimentation that engages methodologies commonly associated with Computer Science, Social Sciences, Statistics and Information Sciences. The Experimental Visualization Lab of the Media Arts and Technology Program at UC Santa Barbara explores this question through research and production in data visualization. Since 2005, they have been parsing and visualizing a steady stream of data generated hourly, consisting of the titles of books, films, music, and miscellaneous items checked out by patrons at the Seattle Central Library. They feel fortunate in having access to this flow of data as it makes visible a community’s aggregate interests without bias, in essence allowing the data to “speak for itself.”

George Legrady


George Legrady: Professor of Interactive Media in the Media Arts & Technology Doctoral program at UC Santa Barbara. He is one of the first generation of artists in the 1980s to integrate computer processes into his artistic work, producing pioneering prizewinning projects in the early 1990s such as the “Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War” (1993), “Slippery Traces” (1995), “Sensing Speaking Space” (2002), “Pockets Full of Memories” (2001-2007) and more recently data visualizations at the Seattle Public Library, with NASA, and the CEB corporation. His contribution to the digital media field since the early stages of its formation into a discipline in the early 1990s has been in intersecting cultural content with data processing as a means of creating new forms of aesthetic representations and socio-cultural narrative experiences. His digital interactive installations have been exhibited internationally.