Figure 1: A visual complexity style visualization of flow patterns in a 2D slice through a simulated supernova collapse, using the mappings: flow orientation → stroke orientation, magnitude → color (dark blue to bright pink for low to high), and pressure → stroke size. Research in human visual cognition suggests that beautiful images can engage the visual system, encouraging it to linger in certain locations in an image and absorb subtle details. By developing aesthetically pleasing visualizations of data, we aim to engage viewers and promote prolonged inspection, which can lead to new discoveries within the data. We present three new visualization techniques that apply painterly rendering styles to vary interpretational complexity (IC), indication and detail (ID), and visual complexity (VC), image properties that are important to aesthetics. Knowledge of human visual perception and psychophysical models of aesthetics provide the theoretical basis for our designs. Computational geometry and nonphotorealistic algorithms are used to preprocess the data and render the visualizations. We demonstrate the techniques with visualizations of real weather and supernova data.

Visualization scientists would like to engage viewers to encourage exploration. A promising approach to engage viewers is to enhance the aesthetic appeal of the visualization. Psychologists believe that aesthetic judgement can be characterized by a number of emotional and cognitive properties. This project aims to identify some qualities that can be varied in visualizations to influence aesthetic judgment. The properties identified by psychologists provide a good starting point. In this proposal, I present three visual qualities, related to these properties. I propose to conduct studies in which these three qualities are varied, to analyze results statistically, and then to seek ways to vary these qualities in a visualization while maintaining Visualizations, graphical representations of data, can provide valuable insights into the datasets they represent. Advances in technology have allowed society to generate and store vast volumes of data. Applications in meteorology, genetics, networking, medical imaging, marketing, and many other areas rely on collecting and analyzing large datasets. Visualizations can facilitate

Art explores and expresses our aesthetic relation to our environment and ourselves. However, since the rise of photography, the value ascribed to art’s representative power has waned and in its place are explorations of the poetics of each piece, the way in which an object’s materiality intervenes in the space (and time) in which it is sited, authorship, the role of the viewer and so on. In 2D media, these subjects have been explored in many ways. Mark Rothko, concerned with the search for the sublime, created vast modernist works than aimed to stupefy the viewer into a response to the hidden ‘divine’. Picasso’s light paintings subverted the photograph’s modus operandi by generating an image over time, rather than in a single snapshot instant. Many artists working in video explore directly the way in which time and image can interact. These concerns offer themselves uniquely to the development of a ‘new ’ medium – an exploration of the way in which ambient information can be represented in a visual, 2D (or perhaps 3D) format. In technologically enhanced modern life, there are many pieces of information relating to the environment, the workplace, the tasks and requirements of users that we can collect, collate and represent- but how do we visualise them? In particular, 2D representations that are aware of individuals and alter their properties according to the relationships between them are interesting. We are not focused on providing a direct mapping between information and representation, but on the creation of a representation of what might be termed the ‘mood ’ of a place, and in the modifications that occur as users interact indirectly with the artefact. This brings the viewer into direct interaction with the artwork, something that has been carried out by digital artists within a gallery or studio environment, but which has not yet transgressed the boundaries of the gallery walls. This defines ambient art: representations of complex environmental and user information that reflect their surroundings as well as simply being displayed in them. This paper presents the rationale for exploring ambient art, details the basic technical infrastructure, and discusses our experiences with using the system.