“My quest is to reveal how everything is interconnected. From the atom to the cell, to the body and beyond into society and the cosmos, there are underlying processes, structures and rhythms that are mirrored all around and permeate reality. I attempt to visualize ‘the molecular process of revolution’; how one small thing leads to another and larger patterns emerge.

I am interested in the parallels between laws of physics and the movements of people, between a political revolution and a spiritual one. Ultimately I am trying to present a view of reality that reflects our changing times. This work embraces the multiple, the network, the paradoxical and the idea that even the smallest gesture or event has significance, and the power to change everything”.

-Sharon Molloy

Field Conditions by Stan Allen in Points + Lines, 1985

(via icaronycteris)

¨Everywhere, except in architecture, complexity and contradiction have been acknowledged, from Godel’s proof of ultimate inconsistency in mathematics to T. S. Eliot’s analysis of “difficult” poetry and Joseph Albers’ definition of the paradoxical quality of painting.

I like elements which are hybrid rather than “pure,” compromising rather than “clean,” distorted rather than “straightforward,” ambiguous rather than “articulated,”

..I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit function as well as the explicit function. I prefer “both-and” to “either-or,” black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white.¨

-Robert Venturi

¨it is not easy to arrive at a conception of a whole
which is constructed from parts belonging to different dimensions.

and not only nature, but also art, her transformed image, is such a whole….this is due to the consecutive nature of the only methods available to us for conveying a clear three-dimensional concept of an image in space, and results from deficiencies of a temporal nature in the spoken word.

for, with such a medium of expression, we lack the means of discussing in its constituent parts, an image which possesses simultaneously a number of dimensions.¨

-on envisioning information by paul klee

maps help navigate, explore, make sense of, and communicate ideas that might otherwise fade into abstraction, or never materialize at all

the field of mapmaking has a new challenge far more involved than merely depicting the easily identifiable traits of the physical world. The task at hand is at once ambitious and amorphous: to map the world of scientific knowledge, the collective wisdom that human beings have accumulated and preserved over the past several centuries. 

to navigate these materials in such a way that data — or “noise with a cognitive pattern,” as the Spanish philosopher George Santayana once called it — can become information, that is, something that serves to “inform.”

If this information can in turn be related to other information, we will have laid the foundation for something much greater. Something like greater knowledge, perhaps even greater understanding.

what these intrepid science mapmakers are trying to do. Their numbers are small—there are only about 300 in the world—and they are attempting to survey the unimaginable amount of scientific data in existence, convinced that by giving it some shape, structure, or interactive presence, they will be helping to build that critical bridge from data to information to knowledge. 

how to represent the known world in a visual way that is accessible to all — a sort of socialism of scientific knowledge.

 “It’s biology and chemistry and physics and astronomy, and you don’t really know how they all go together. But there are very interesting networks of connections and dynamics among them.”

Whatever the type of map, the idea, says Borner, is to produce what she calls a “global brain,” ///“It’s the idea that you would interconnect people around the globe, and empower large numbers of people, rich and poor, to really understand science and technology. You want to give them, she emphasizes, “the data and expertise to trigger certain behavior that is beneficial for the planet and species.”

The maps in the Atlas of Science, and science mapping itself, are a visual interface of what we collectively know. And they are meant to be visually stunning. To “deeply engage the minds,” as Borner puts it, you need to stir people not only intellectually but also emotionally.

Perhaps one day we can create a base map of science, analogous to a map of our world, upon which different types of data can be overlaid and communicated effectively.

notes from mapping science

¨Babbage saw his Analytical Engine & its predecessor the Difference Engine, both of them unfinished, as machines that could ultimately compute away some of society´s ills trough mathematics. 

To Babbage, the whole world was a complex numerical problem waiting to be solved.

Now the mathematical exactitude of computers and their programs can even create imaginary worlds that still have empirical qualities, and it is this phenomenon that gives the virtual world its awesome power.

This power is seen by some to be immensely liberating, and by others to be stripping us of our liberty.¨

-Neil Spiller