SoIT's News, Issue 2 2008

Visual Connections at the School of IT

We live in a world that is rich in information. Still we collect more and more data, and to make sense of it all we embrace new technologies that help us to make useful connections between the elemental bits of our data deluge. Whether we deal in stocks, biology, medicine, sociology, politics, literature, marketing, engineering, industrial design or ecology, we all seem to be striving to find knowledge in a vast unmapped sea of data.

Information Visualisation is the science that seeks to take large data sets and render them on two or three dimensional surfaces. It makes maps and pictures of abstract data. The aim is to help people explore new information spaces for useful patterns, to make visual connections, to find knowledge.

Of course artists have had a long tradition of exploring and communicating in visual ways. The information they seek to express ranges from unspoken emotions to cold logic, from the perceptual to the cognitive. So there is a connection between these artists and these scientists who visualise information. Indeed many techniques and tools classically used by artists are now used algorithmically by computer scientists. They include spaces of points, lines and surfaces, colours, symmetries, enclosures and connections.

This exhibit showcases some of the visual connections between art, science and information. Some works are images from the science of information visualisation while others cross the borderlines of art and science, exploring on canvas the issues of visual connection. Included are the work of both scientists and artists, all of who are connected to the School of Information Technologies at The University of Sydney.

The Visual Connections Exhibition will be displayed in the exhibition space on Level 2 of the School of IT Building from 10-24 June 2008. Alumni are warmly invited to visit the exhibition.

The artwork included here; ‘Abstract Trains of Thought’, is by School of IT alumnus Dr Keith Nesbitt. Dr Nesbitt completed his PhD ‘Designing Multi-sensory Displays for Abstract Data’ in the Information Visualisation group in 2003.

Professor Peter Eades, Chair of Software Technology