Welcome to our ongoing Q&A series, where we're introducing you to some of the designers behind the work you see at Visualizing.org. If you'd like to weigh in with comments or additional questions, please post your thoughts below!

This week we chat with Salvatore Iaconesi, a freelance information artist also known as xDxD.vs.xDxD. Originally from Italy, Salvatore has led a peripatetic life — working in Italy, Ireland, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Mexico, United States, Brazil, Malaysia, Japan, Turkey and Denmark while pursuing vocations and avocations ranging from graffiti and electronic music to open data "squatting" and venture capital consulting. Whether writing for his online diary Art is Open Source or teaching courses on digital cultures at the Università di Roma “La Sapienza,” Salvatore belies neat categorization — as we quickly learned when we sat down with him to discuss musical visualization, augmented realities, and why we're at the point of abandoning statistics for anthropology.

A sample of Salvatore's work:

V: How and when did you get started in data visualization?

SI: I have always felt that visualization is a vast area of activity that sits across art, design, engineering, and science — an area that is hard to define and yet has shaped many heterogeneous moments of my life. I also feel music as one of the best techniques to "visualize" information. I used to be a musician (I still am, but since dedicating myself to other disciplines, music-making happens more rarely) and a composer, and I was really interested in generative music: sounds generated from algorithms and data. One of my favorite artists, Luca Bertini, a few years ago created a musical composition called "29," as in "1929," the year of Wall Street's financial crash. The notes in the composition were generated directly from the measurements of the fluctuations of various stocks during the crash. It is probably the most beautiful "information visualization" that I have ever experienced, as the stock market data were rendered in an extremely understandable, perceivable way. Complex data, simultaneously variable data, subtle changes, patterns, multiple agencies, co-variations: everything was right there, perceivable, analyzable at micro, macro and intermediate levels, in the beauty and immediacy of music.

This power is what seduced me into getting involved into information visualization: the ability to transform complex information into something that is wonderfully sensorial, speaking in multiple ways to our senses, perceptions, cognitions, emotions; the possibility of narrating new forms of stories, created by millions of people through the information which they generate with their jobs, their daily lives, their relationships, emotions and personal histories.

V: Tell us about a data viz project you’re especially proud of.

SI: Well, here is one that's pretty foolish, but I enjoyed it a lot nonetheless. It is called Chakraputer. It was created for an art performance in which the computer's hardware was interpreted as if it was a body, and the systems of this "body" were interpreted as chakras. A small bit of software grabbed, in realtime, all the information about the functioning of the computer's hardware and stimulated the computer's chakras accordingly. In the art performance, the computer sat side by side with a yoga master, and there was this surreal competition between computer and yoga master: whoever reached Kundalini state first, won. :) The visualization was done using 3D cubes of varying sizes according to the various parameters coming from the computer's hardware and network access, and the sound was also generated from these values, providing a semi-hypnotic, yet lucid representation of the state of the machine.

V: What’s the most exciting development that’s happened in the field in the past year?

SI: The most interesting thing that happened this year is probably that we've almost gotten to the point at which we will be able to abandon statistics in favor of anthropology. This year more than ever we saw more and more systems avoiding simplification of the data: people, after all, are not percentages. It is progressively more true that the organic, systemic, complex features of the visualizations we can create now are so powerful and expressive that we can often place incredibly granular data side by side with overall percentages, generating entire new visions of the realities which we are analyzing.

This possibility is a game-changer, specifically important for the issues of marginality, multi-cultural societies, markets, social networks, and politics, which are completely changing. The word "niche" is to be taken really seriously in these times of internet-based consensus and world-cognition. From this perspective information visualization can become a truly powerful tool. Powerful in unprecedented, unforeseen ways, allowing to perceive global visions as well as incredibly small details, all-together, in really effective, usable, communicable, accessible ways. Something policy makers should really learn how to leverage.

V: Where do you see data visualization heading in the next couple of years?

SI: I have a small vision here, though it is supported by lots of evidence in current technological adoption trends. Internet is (obviously) leaving the screen and entering in our physical world, in places, objects, bodies. Technologies like augmented reality, spime, sensors, ubiquitous displays, smartphones, tablets, wearables, low information devices, can bring information anywhere.

With these technologies, we can construct entire 3D, ubiquitous, realtime, extremely complex infoscapes, and layer them onto the world, and make them accessible through even a simple smartphone. And we can create multiple infoscapes, and make them interact with each other, and compare them, autonomously, freely, relationally.

So, here is an example among a million possible ones: A new type of company could originate, publishing information on products using augmented reality, so that when you to the supermarket you can check your smartphone and see a beautiful information visualization showing you the main parameters of the sustainability, ecology, and corporate responsibility policies of the product's manufacturer. Right there, in real time, in real space, in augmented reality. Actually, it is not even the future (at least not "too" future), as we produced a prototype of this company in an art project called "Squatting Supermarkets." People loved it and were more than ready to understand the implications brought on by these kinds of changes.

V: What's one visualization or data set you’ve always wanted to tackle but haven’t yet had the time?

SI: It's more an idea than a precise dataset. I have always been interested in spiritual experiences across cultures, technologies and global events. Spirituality is something that exists and that contributes to the ways in which people perceive the world just as much as technologies, events, relationships, jobs, societies, friendships. And all these factors emerge in the ways in which we communicate and express ourselves across media and environments.

Today we have the possibility of using digital public spaces to globally observe the ways in which people communicate. But very few (or none) of them have taken a look at spirituality — maybe they have considered the distribution of religions and philosophies, but not from the point of view of spirituality from symbolic, linguistic, cultural perspectives.

I am very interested in this, in using the global public space provided by social networks as a realtime dataset to observe and analyze humans' spiritual take on the world, as it probably would reveal very interesting information about the common desires and aspirations that unite us across cultures, nations, religions. It would be incredibly interesting to turn this kind of analysis into a — who knows — maybe a pocketable tool for any human who wishes to have a visual reminder of the potential richness and beauty of humanity.

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