http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/29/van-gogh-pihttp://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/29/van-gogh-pie-charts.htmle-charts.html
Tufte damned pie charts; they are hard to read individually and hard to compare en masse. These pie charts do not explain which specific real-world entities they refer to. The method by which their data was chosen is not explained. If you can work out their subjects they exclude more than they include. As information graphics they are chartjunk, visual noise making information harder to comprehend rather than easier to examine. They are incompetent as information graphics. But to what end? The angles of each pie section around the central point are, I allege, a visual progression from the artist's earlier image of Battersea Power Station, its flat planes triangulated in a way that won't upset a 3D computer graphics rendering engine of the kind used by Julian Opie circa 1995. Its colours refer back to twentieth century travel advertising lithographs, as does its subject and its subject's presentation. The colours of the pie charts also refer back to twentieth century travel advertising lithographs more than to Van Gogh. They are warm and rich at the same time as lacking full saturation and any great contrast. There's a more complex visual language being used here than the reader of either "The Visual Display Of Quantitative information" or "London Transport Posters" will be able to take in at first glance. The imperative to guess, the abstraction, the multiple references of the visual language are all part of the art. What's good as art is usually bad as X. Where X is science or politics or religion there's not a contradiction within the visual form of the art, but information graphics such as charts are already visual form. Artists can use lab equipment or revolutionary rhetoric for aesthetic effect but information graphics are already the use of aesthetic effect. This is a challenge that the artist using the aesthetic effects of information graphics for their aesthetic effects must answer. "Can you tell what it is yet?", Rolf Harris used to ask. It was marker on paper, or paint on wall. Have you ever tried pointing your finger at the moon for a dog? I don't have a dog. If you do then try it and let me know. Maybe if enough people do it we can chart the resulting dataset. - Rob. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
