VISAP 2014 - The IEEE VIS 2014 Arts Program

The IEEE VIS 2014 Arts Program, or VISAP'14, showcases high-quality artwork and research that explores the exciting and increasingly prominent intersections between art and visualization. Through a dedicated papers track and an art show that runs concurrently with the IEEE 2014 VIS conference, the Arts Program aims to foster new thinking, discussion, and collaboration between artists, designers, technologists, visualization scientists, and others working at the intersection of these fields.
The theme for VISAP'14 is Art+Interpretation. In certain ways artists and visualization researchers share common goals: to make things visible which are normally difficult to see; and to enable reasoning about information that we might otherwise remain ignorant of. A conventional explanation of the differences between art practice and visualization research is that artistic exploration raises new questions, while visualization research aims to help domain experts answer existing questions. However, these categorizations may be oversimplified. Media artists create opportunities for reflecting on cultural issues, but also highlight how we absorb technology and explore how the exposure to tremendous amounts of data affects our daily lives. Recently, in the visualization community, significant emphasis has been placed on notions such as indicating uncertainty, accurately portraying data provenance, and using narrative techniques to aid in transmitting information more effectively. Visualization systems not only provide a representation of data collections, but also, wittingly or unwittingly, provide an interpretation of that data. Hence, potential areas of overlap between art and research practices are becoming more discernible, which raises the following key questions: Can artistic practice offer insight into thinking about the effective interpretability of complex data? Conversely, can visualization research offer quantifiable methods to artists seeking to investigate and represent cultural phenomena? In this year's call for entries, we are looking especially for projects and papers that explore the relationships between visualization research and artistic practice, and that present or discuss creative visual techniques that emphasize the interpretative or narrative aspects of scientific or cultural exploration.
This year, in collaboration with Leonardo/ISAST, we will be selecting outstanding submissions to appear in a special section of an issue of Leonardo, the Journal of the International Society of the Arts, Sciences and Technology. That is, in addition to appearing in the on-line VISAP'14 proceedings, authors can elect (once accepted to the conference) to have their submissions evaluated for the journal publication.