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Data Visualization and the Subject of Political Aesthetics

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Postdigital Aesthetics

Abstract

Contemporary digital formalism emerges in the concept of ‘beautiful data’ (Halpern 2015), the visualization of information in intrinsically pleasing patterns which may or may not also provide useful ways of using the data. Data visualization is now both big business and a ubiquitous feature of digital arts and the aesthetic of the ‘postdigital’. It is also a privileged vehicle for the mimetic impulse to re-enter contemporary aesthetic practice, and it is this new formalist mimesis that forms the focus of this chapter.

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© 2015 Sean Cubitt

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Cubitt, S. (2015). Data Visualization and the Subject of Political Aesthetics. In: Berry, D.M., Dieter, M. (eds) Postdigital Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437204_14

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