ART

THE PURPOSE OF ART

ambiguity or data sets

By Ben Conway

Beautiful, isn't it

People frequently misunderstand the purpose of art. One common misconception is that art must be ambiguous in its meaning. Another common misconception treats art and science as polar opposites. These ideas are widespread, and also completely wrong. There are numerous historical examples of artists attempting to communicate unambiguously.

For instance, the writers of Greek tragedy attempted to present social views in the most obvious fashion possible, as a form of entertainment for mass consumption. There are also numerous historical examples of artists drawing inspiration from science, and vice versa. Renowned children’s book author Beatrix Potter was also a scientist who contributed to the study of fungi. (Britannica Academic, “Beatrix Potter.”) Science is obviously used by the creative genre of science fiction, and science fiction in turn influences scientists -- an article in the journal Nature, for instance, tracks the scientific impact of the TV show Star Trek (Perkowitz, “Boldly Going for 50 Years.”) Science and art are not opposites, but shape culture in similar fashions.

Star Trek creator merging science and art

Scientific illustration provides one modern-day counterexample to both misconceptions. The purpose of a scientific illustration is to communicate. This communication succeeds when science and art are combined in a way that is easily understood and carries visual beauty. “Beautiful communication” could be its two-word manifesto.

Nobody listens to Moonlight Sonata to find out about the Moon. The music instead conveys the emotional quality of moonlight, in a beautiful way. This requires the beauty of Beethoven's composition, and an idea to be communicated. Moonlight Sonata begins with slow ascending sequences, descending briefly and wavering at points, with a few notes being higher than the rest. The entire first movement continues this slow ascending pattern. The slowness reflects the psychological reaction to moonlight -- our minds slow down when we are tired or relaxing after activity, and this generally occurs at night.

Many of the notes in the piece are at the low end of the scale, which is also suggestive of moonlight---lower notes carry a psychological darkness. Since moonlight is only a noticeable effect at night, this darkness creates the ‘nighttime’ setting of the piece. A similar type of slowness combined with low notes is encountered in the nocturnes of Frédéric Chopin, another musical depiction of the nighttime. So we see that with both of these works, there is a concept that is communicated.

Here's the data set

Even a simple bar chart or graph has the capability to communicate in this fashion---while its communication may not convey emotion per se, it communicates information in a different fashion than text. This allows people to easily grasp the information intuitively--- Moonlight Sonata can make the listener feel moonlight, a graph can make the viewer feel data. Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information provides support to the latter claim.

Consider two ways of presenting the same information: 0, 2, 97, 2

Or:

Easy to understand and elegant

In both cases, the data is the same. The bar chart, however, is more easy to understand--a single data value clearly towers over the others. When the data is presented as text, the data values tend to be more difficult to understand. All of the values in the list are similar in appearance, meaning that our visual processing ability is unable to easily distinguish between them and thus this portion of our brainpower is not used when we are analyzing the list. The graph makes use of our visual-processing ability, both harnessing additional brainpower and allowing our minds to process information in a different way--we can feel what is happening in the data, instead of just consciously examining it.

This can give us a new perspective and reveal information in the data that we might otherwise have overlooked, especially those of us who have no training in mathematics or science. In fact, Tufte carries this reasoning further than I do by demonstrating that there are cases where a simple graph will reveal information that even an advanced calculation would miss. And throughout the book, Tufte's central theme is that a well-designed graph must communicate its information clearly--that is, without ambiguity.

You may doubt the connection between a graph and a painting, but there is a strong connection. A graph is set apart from a simple visual pattern in the same way any other artwork is--a good painting has meaning, and so does a graph. Piet Mondrian’s painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie is driven by Mondrian's intent to convey a feeling of fast-paced city life. The artwork communicates this concept through feelings of complexity, interconnectedness, and artificial light. It does not directly depict any elements of city life, aside from the possibility that its pattern vaguely resembles a street grid. So the artwork is not just the directly observable form it is in, it also has a concept.

Piet Mondrian proves my point

All artwork is based on a concept--even the readymades of Marcel Duchamp are based on a concept challenging conventional ideas of art. And so we see that the purpose of art is to communicate the concept, whether it is a logic-based concept or a more emotional one. This communication happens at an intuitive level--we don’t consciously process the concept, instead we emotionally feel the concept. The concept in Mondrian’s painting is an emotion. A graph’s concept is a dataset. Though in some sense, all artwork is based on a dataset.

A scientific artwork has a concept based on an objective universal dataset. Other forms of art usually have concepts based on subjective personal datasets derived from the artist’s own experience. This distinction, however, does not separate art from non-art. It merely separates one form of art from another. Ambiguity arises in an artwork because of the dataset, not the artwork. Someone experiencing at the artwork may not have experienced the event the artist was representing at all. They may instead map a completely different event onto it--as, in fact, happened with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

Moonlight Sonata was not originally intended to communicate the experience of moonlight. Someone else found that it matched their subjective moonlight dataset, and gave that name to it. (Britannica Academic, “Moonlight Sonata.”) The name stuck because others found that it matched their moonlight dataset, too. The artwork is not ambiguous, the underlying phenomenon or emotion is ambiguous. Beethoven was trying to communicate a particular emotion, which turned out to be one that many people felt in the presence of moonlight. There were varying interpretations of the emotional experience, but this ambiguity stems from the uncertainty of emotions themselves.

We kind of agree about this

Likewise, a graph will communicate a certain set of measurements of a certain phenomenon. There may be varying interpretations of what that data means, but this ambiguity stems from the nature of the data itself---the phenomenon can have multiple explanations. This means that art and science, while they do have differences, are not opposites. They function in a similar way. A well-designed graph is a work of art.

2.

What is a well-designed graph? Tufte devotes most of his book to this subject, and in the first chapter offers a few tenets of design: present the information, induce logical reasoning about the subject, show the data accurately, show the data in a compact form, make the information easily understood, promote visual analysis of the information, allow all patterns in the data to be recognized, have an understandable intent, and be presented with other representations of the data.

He further explains that a good graph should attempt to convey multiple types of information in a single image. A good graph thus conveys different aspects of a dataset. Most other good works of art will generally function in the same way -- Moonlight Sonata conveys darkness and moonlight, tiredness and calmness. Broadway Boogie-Woogie conveys artificial light, division of space, and the feeling of being around large numbers of other people. In other words, they convey different aspects of their subjective dataset.

Edward Tufte

Tufte then addresses a different issue: what is a badly-designed graph? Tufte explains that bad graphs are ones that mislead or confuse the viewer, especially ones where the numerical data and the graphical elements do not match each other. His proposal is that any change in the data should be represented by a proportional change on the graph, as opposed to some graphs that make small changes look big or big changes look small. In Tufte’s own words: “Show data variation, not design variation.” The information must be communicated clearly, to show the facts of the matter. There may be differing interpretations of what these facts mean--and, in fact, there frequently are. But there is one set of data. This data must be shown clearly--so the audience can focus their attention on figuring out what the data means, rather than having to first try to figure out what the data is.

So, as our ‘beautiful communication’ manifesto implies, a good graph must communicate well. If an artist or musician set out to communicate one emotion, and their audience could not agree at all on what the emotion of the work was, we would not consider the work successful. Clear communication of some idea or feeling is what separates art from chaos. This same type of rule also applies to less direct, more representational forms of artwork.

Since this article is about science and art, I searched for examples in scientific contexts. Surveying the open-access linguistics journal Glossa, we find the usual graphs and diagrams. This should be fairly unsurprising in this context. There are far fewer representational illustrations. However, a few articles do have small illustrations accompanying them. For instance, the article When You Isn’t You: The attraction of self-ascription in children’s interpretation of pronouns in reported speech (Köder and Maier) uses a simple 3-panel sequence of images with characters to explain a scenario.

Simple but effective

While what is effectively a comic strip might initially seem out of place in an advanced scientific journal, it is a reasonable choice--artwork of this kind is an effective tool to communicate narrative, and this narrative concept needs to be communicated to explain the science. Linguistics is the study of communication, and communication is in fact half of our two-word manifesto. Language, like art, is a system to make people feel and understand.

Yet linguistics, and many other fields of science, remain largely unseen in illustrations. This is reflective of a general trend in the relationship between science and culture. Too often, science is seen as an isolated activity that is too complicated for the public to understand--or too boring for the public to want to understand. Artwork, on the other hand, is widely accepted as an integral part of culture and an activity that people enjoy. Yet science has a deep connection to art. Art needs to have a concept to communicate, and science discovers concepts. The two activities can be combined, and the combination causes people to realize that there is beauty in the world that they never even knew existed.

©Ben Conway and the CCA Arts Review