Making the Invisible Visible and Visual Perception Politics

'Automation of perception of the world is on the drawing board. As video maker Gary Hill puts it: 'Vision is no longer the possibility of seeing but the impossibility of not seeing.'

The data created on new media like Facebook and Twitter is a new form of 'seeing,' the internet poses the question on to what is visible? The fact that our information is ultimately stored, and used unexpectedly by internet giants like Google reiterates the fact that new forms of publishing have a greater 'invisible' component. It is through visualisation that we can comprehend the invisible - we create new patterns and structures to form new relationships and new forms of knowledge. It is the art of 'joining the dots', 'putting the puzzle pieces together' to code and decode new meanings. A visualisation is a representation of a more complex theme, it forms the basis of learning about something new. The purpose of a visualisation is to discover the unknown. Visualisation is a way of understanding how archives are used to create forms of content and expression, modes of publishing and distribution and aggregation. 

Codes can be visible and invisible - a recipe, morse code, brail, sign language, databases, computer programs and video games have codes embedded within, and it is that invisibility which makes them all the more interesting. Going back to Gary Hill, the '...impossibility of not seeing,' steams the question do we want everything to be visible? 

Examples of visualisations include train line maps, the Periodic Table and Facebook friend networks     (having mutual friends create a common node and builds upon an invisible connection). It is a visual tool to understanding more complex themes and relationships. It is a compilation of data, taken with an aesthetic approach to reassemble our social engagements. For example data from the Bureau of Statistics uses the past, present and future data to generate graphs and visual tools in order to interpret the invisible connections e.g. the correlation between age and gender, country and age etc. Images, like signs and graphs are a real-time visualisation which evokes context and content.

Virilio, Paul (1997) ‘Eye lust’ in Open Sky London: Verso: 89-102

WORD = 'visible' and 'real-time'