Audience and motivations

Perhaps now is the time to outline my motivations and intentions in a little more detail. 

As someone with one foot in science and the other in the visual arts, I frequent blogs and other online islands of information sharing which span both areas, often presenting hugely divergent landscapes.  Something which I find from both angles, however, is a shared love of intelligent beauty, in particular the presentation of data in a meaningful and visually appealing way.  This is most obviously manifest in the widespread sharing of the most elegant and exciting infographics, such as those found on Information is Beautiful. 

One particularly appealing example is this physical sculpture which represents the population density distribution within many of the capital cities of the world.  This installation in the Turbine hall would be just as appreciated by the arty 'set' as the scientific one.  Its cleverness, simplicity and effectiveness appeal across the perceived art/science divide. 

Concepts of attribution, traceability and accountability are increasingly evident in the realm of blogging, in the form of trackbacks and "found via"s.  Similarly, from the other end, ideas of citations and sources (which are now so easy to include in a text) are creeping in from Wikipedia and its ilk. 

Another example of beautiful information, and the one which most inspired this project, was the historic map I mentioned previously. 

An idea which intrigued me again and again during the philosophical 'science and society' module which we did in the first term was the notion of a scientific idea as undergoing a continual process of refinement and revision.  This contrasts sharply to the textbook science and known-outcome experiments we experience in classrooms.  I wish to erode this notion of scientific ideas as ossified facts which spring into being, fully formed and rigidly resistance to change.  In addition, I want to incorporate ideas of accountability and transparency, which shows the antecedents of an idea, its origins, its developments, the path that thinkers took to get to what we have now - our current best guess. 

It is my hope that by creating a beautiful, engaging piece which appeals primarily at a visual level, it will introduce to those of a more artistic bent these notions of science as an ongoing process where everything is questionable, but accountable.  I would also like the piece to appeal to those of a more scientific persuasion that art has something to offer, in giving opportunities of directly and engagingly presenting ideas which become ingrained by practice.

In this project, the medium is not the message but is intended to be the vehicle which will take that message to viewers, to grab their attention just enough that they might just begin to look at science, or the presentation of science, in a new way.