When asking Jonathan, about his work, he says that he does weird work that does not really fit into any genre. He is often compared to graphic designers, computer science people, visual artists and anthropologists. While his work borrows from all these categories, it's not entirely any of them. He prefers to refer to his work as storytelling.
Jonathan explains to us his work process. He usually starts with a theme or a topic that he wants to explore which are usually a very simple idea or a simple question. That question could be something like, "What does the soul of internet look like?" or " if we were to make new constellation in today's night sky, how would we decide what they would be? " or "What are the ways that people search for love?". He starts with a question and then tries to find a way to gather a lot of information that can help him answer that question empirically. It sometimes involve writing computer programs or him traveling to other parts of the world to collect information. But the first step for him is always collecting information. Once he gathers information, he looks at the information that he gathered and tries to see if there is any patterns that can come out of it.
He sometimes writes computer softwares to assist him in that process of searching for these patterns. Once he has analyzed the information, he starts thinking about the best way to represent it visually. Jonathan insists that there should be a close connection between the way something looks and what the thing is. That's also why all of his works have different aesthetics to them. They are each designed to be native to the type of data that is being talked about.
Clement and I were interested to hear Jonathan's definition of Visualization, One of the skills that we, at project NML, find significant for the kids to learn.
Jonathan believes that data visualization is a buzz word that you can hear all the time. When he was younger, he was very obsessed with data visualization for its own sake. He made a number of projects that purely visualized data. "In fact, there was no meaning to it or no story to it. It was just about showing the data", Jonathan says. For example, he made a project in 2002-03, called word count, which simply takes the 88,000 most frequently used english words and displays them side by side as a very long sentence, where all the words are scaled based on their frequency.
"That's a very fun, playful thing to look at, and a lot of people like it, but for me it's not really that interesting because there is no story there, there is no secret that is being revealed. It's just eye candy basically. It's designed with no content." (Jonathan Harris)
Jonathan insists that most of the time people just get a data set and they visualize it in a beautiful way. They are worshiping the cult of aesthetics without actually worrying about the meaning behind it. It's very important to have both. You really need to have great content with a great message and also you need to have great design to present that content in a beautiful way. Jonathan sees data visualization as one tool in your tool box out of many many tools.
"I think about it now, as I am older, I think of data visualization as just another tool that I can use to help tell stories really beautifully. You have to have the story to begin with." (Jonathan Harris)
There is a lot of ways that people tell stories (Movies, novels,radio,photography and theatre). Jonathan believes that people are always striving to find new and better ways to tell stories that take advantage of the new technologies. For a long time there was no such thing as film. Then film came along. And it soon became a beautiful medium where people had become total virtuosous using this medium to tell stories. Jonathan believes that nobody has reached that level with the web yet. It's kind of in the awkward adolescence. No one has really figured out how to tell stories beautifully online. And that's something that he is very interested in doing. That's also why Jonathan believes that there are always new ways for storytelling that emerge and some of
them stick around and others don't stick around but the good ones will become apparent over time.
To be continued...
"Jonathan Harris has made projects about human desire, modern mythology, science, news, anonymity and language and also documented an Alaskan Eskimo Whale Hunt. He was commissioned by Yahoo! to build the world's largest time capsule, and by MoMA to build an interactive installation about online dating. He studied computer science at Princeton University, and was awarded a 2004 Fabrica fellowship. The winner of three Webby Awards, his work has also been recognized by AIGA, Ars Electronica, Print, ID Magazine, and the State of Vermont, has been featured by CNN, BBC, NPR, Reuters, Metropolis, The New York Times, USA Today, and Wired, and has been exhibited at Le Centre Pompidou (Paris), and MoMA (New York). He has given lectures all over the world, including at Google, Princeton and Stanford Universities, the TED Conference, and on Bhutanese television. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York."
Continue reading An Afternoon With Jonathan Harris-- Part 1
