Conclusion

The visualizations presented here were developed over the summer of 2009, through a continuous exchange of ideas and information not only with the technical staff in charge of the archive databases, but also with media art experts commenting on the semantic perspective of the represented information.

I see the work as part of a young tradition of information aesthetics.^[56] The scientific discipline of information visualization is usually concerned with characterizing methods of visual mapping in general, and optimizing the readability and understandability of the resulting visualizations. Information aesthetics builds on results from that area; however, being a design discipline, it strives to find a sensory representation of information based on a specific dataset that not only is useable and readable on the explicit data-representation level but, in addition, increases the "propositional density"^[57] of the design piece—in short, the evocative character of a visualization and what can be read "between the lines." This approach places the discipline between the traditional fields of information visualization, user interface design, and art.