Integrating Art with Knowledge Visualization and the Pursuit of Science
Slides used for presentation at the Second Symposium on Information & Technology in the Arts & Humanities (May 18, 2016). http://www.asis.org/SIG/SIGAH/2016/01/15/2016-symposium/ The Symposium was sponsored by the Special Interest Groups for Arts and Humanities (SIG AH) and Visualization, Images, and Sound (SIG VIS) of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).
Symposium presentations can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2v-vQy9W5DeXsuC5-l-T65WgFrPFKNDk
This presentation will focus on my personal experience and the journey from being a graduate student in life sciences three years ago to becoming an entrepreneur and then artist. Although art has always been present as a core component of my upbringing, furiously sketching abstract drawings in any piece of paper I could, I dedicated myself to a career in life sciences, relegating any artistic activity to the category of ‘stress reliever’ and ‘hobby’ as means to distract myself from the daily pressure of academic life. The first concrete opportunity in which I integrated my artistic curiosity with science was in 2013 when writing a paper in the field of plant comparative genomics. I came to realize at the time that many of the graphs I prepared to communicate my findings had a high degree of aesthetics and artistic abstraction. I remember thinking: “Wow, this is kind of art!” and that impression stayed with me as testimony of artistic curiosity mixed with analytical thinking. When I started my own company in 2014 and decided to develop knowledge visualization software with the objective to glance a particular field of knowledge from a visual perspective, the integration of my artistic sensibility with the principles of user experience design came very handy. As I worked with developers in creating software features that involved interactive graphs and visualization diagrams, the opportunity to include artistic sensibility grew as well. Indeed, not only the software had components of 'abstract art' in it but also the webpage included at the time 'digital art' on top of the tabs that composed the pages. Such integration was well received by many colleagues in the life sciences community. From this experience I developed a love for coding and information visualization and design. I conceived a clear vision as to how one could integrate seemingly unrelated fields into a singular enterprise to address an important problem in today's world: information overflow and our capacity to digest relevant content from it. Thus, from October 2015 I decided then to take a dedicated time to explore, reflect and re-invent myself professionally at the intersection of the aforementioned disciplines. Indeed, I started by learning to code and using my new acquired language to program computers to 'help' me create abstract art with the idea of gaining the necessary knowledge and skills to produce highly engaging visual content that can be used far beyond the realm of pure art with the long-term goal of integrating it with scientific activities; an artistic approximation to science.
Martin Calvino is a digital technology artist, entrepreneur and scientist. He is currently working on his first book addressing from a visual perspective the topic of social media’s cover images from user’s profiles as dedicated canvas space to create abstract art. His long-term goal is to integrate digital abstract art with science as a novel channel to communicate complex processes and discoveries to mainstream society. Prior to his artistic efforts, Martin’s entrepreneurial activity involved the creation of a novel cloud-based software tool for the visualization and retrieval of knowledge contained in digital libraries of scholarly articles. This experience developed in him a deep interest for information visualization and design. Martin holds a PhD in plant molecular genetics from Rutgers University and a Master’s degree in the same field of study from Tsukuba University.
