Analog Infoviz: Ward Shelley’s Hand-Painted Visualizations

What Warhol has to do with lost loves, boat building and the VCR.

Here at Brain Pickings, we believe that our understanding of the world at large takes shape through our understanding of the interconnectedness of various cultural patterns — aesthetic movements, political ideologies, technological innovations, literary traditions, and everything in between. We’re also big fans of data visualization as an intuitive way of digesting and illuminating these patterns and connections. Which is why we love the work of artist Ward Shelley, who swaps the algorithm for a paintbrush to create phenomenal hand-painted infographic visualizations of art history, from the invention of avant-garde to the life and work of Frank Zappa.

It is the mutually formative effects of subject/mind and object/world that gives shape to the space that exists between them. These paintings are a record of this shaping process. They are about the struggle of form to express content in the cognitive space that exists between the Subject (us) and the Object (the world). If that cognitive space is a territory, these paintings are landscapes of that territory. ~ Ward Shelley

Each oil painting takes months to create, starting with the collection of the data, which is then organized and tentatively layed out on the page in pencil to accommodate the constant revisions. When a somewhat stable layout is reach, Shelly transfers the work to mylar, which enables him to use other photographic techniques, inching towards a permanent version in oils.

Shelley makes three versions of a painting based on the same information, each unique in its actual production, from color scheme to brushwork. Which we find to be a wonderful metaphor for the subjectivity of human experience — the idea that two people can have a dramatically different interpretation and experience of the exact same set of circumstances.

Bridging historiography — the study of how historical events are interpreted — and pseudo-statistics, Shelley’s paintings convey a self-referential story of art, a sort of meta-cognition about art history and aesthetic tradition that bespeaks our complex and ever-evolving relationship with the art world.

One of our favorites is his autobiography, which displays his lifetime’s loves, philosophy, identities and other nuggets of personality — from his sequence of close friends to the VCR to the abrupt dead end that is advertising. It reminds of the Feltron Annual Report, Nick Felton’s brilliant visualization of his personal life over the corse of the year.

It this age of the art of the algorithm, it’s refreshing to see the art of art — about art. Explore Ward Shelley’s wonderful analog visualizations for a dose of candor, humor and delightful one-point-ohness.

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Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map

Nebulae, web mavens, and what the Kabbalah has to do with 100 years of music history.

In 1931, Harry Beck designed the first diagramatic map of the London Underground. By 1960, the Tube Map had evolved into the icon of minimalist modern design that we know and love today — a meme, even. And as any meme, it has spawned a number of creative derivatives. Here are five such tube-map-inspired gems.

MILKY WAY TRANSIT AUTHORITY

A dreadfully long subway commute can often send you scrambling for ways to bend the space-time continuum. Now, one scientist has done just that — sort of. Samuel Arbesman, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow in computational sociology, has created The Milky Way Transit Authority — a brilliantly simplified map of the Milky Way displaying the complex interconnections of our galaxy in a digestible way.

Beyond the clever visualization concept, we love the fusion of science and philosophy in Arbesman approach:

People ask why I haven’t marked ‘You Are Here’ on the map – but I think it’s more humbling to realize that we aren’t the center of the universe.” ~ Samuel Arbesman

We also find it fascinating to think of the incredible and daunting vastness of the universe in such mundane terms — there’s something eerily soothing about this hop-hop-there-it-is approach to the celestial expanse.

GOING UNDERGROUND

In 2006, the ambitious folks at The Guardian‘s Culture Vulture blog set out to plot the branches and connections of 100 years of music on a London-Tube-style map. From Ray Charles to Radiohead, the project is an impressive feat of musicology and cultural history.

Each line represents a different genre, with the influential musicians in it as the stops.

We strongly encourage you to explore this priceless and fascinating blueprint to 20th-century music culture — grab a high-res PDF here.

KABBALAH TREE OF LIFE

Making sense of religious doctrine can get messy and confusing. This tube-style map of the Kabbalah Tree of Life, first spotted in Alan Moore’s comic book series Promethea, attempts to shed light on the Sephiroth — the ten attributes of God in the Kabbalah.

Despite the seeming simplicity of the map, it plays on many of the Kabbalah’s sacred numbers and relationships. The three columns, for instance, arrange the ten sepiroth according to the three pillars — the Pillar of Mildness, the Pillar of Mercy, and the Pillar of Severity. And the twenty-two lines connecting the sephiroth reflect the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.

To make things even more elaborate, adding the 10 sepiroth and 22 lines together makes 32, the number of Masonic degrees and the number of Kabbalistic paths to wisdom.

SOMERSET TOURS

I’m a big believers in using the familiar as a metaphor that introduces and piques interest in the unfamiliar. And the folks at the Somerset Tourism Bureau in the UK tend to agree — so they created this wonderful Heritage Touring Map based on the London Tube Map, featuring seven thoughtfully curated “lines” of tourist attractions and must-sees.

Already a clear box-breaking thinker in tourism communication, the Somerset office even has its very own Vimeo channel, including seven short films, one about each tour “line”.

WEB TREND MAP

Every year, Japanese-Swiss design studio Information Architects maps the web’s biggest influencers, subway-style. The project’s latest installment, Web Trend Map 4, is an absolute masterpiece of design, data visualization, and digital anthropology — which, in fact, has enjoyed a level of viralness deeming it worthy of being on the map itself.

Sure, WTM may be based on the Tokyo Metro Map, but that was actually built borrowing heavily from the London Tube Map, so it’s just a matter of degrees of creative separation.

BONUS

I’ve featured it before, to a great response, so it’s worth mentioning the MBTI Personality Map and its psychosocial genius.

Each subway line represents one of the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types, arranged based on the semantic distance between the 39 core word descriptors. The outer circle contains the 161 original word descriptors from the MDS test, grouped into 8 layers based on hierarchical order. Finally, the colors of the words intuitively represent their meaning — so “calm” is in the blue spectrum and “passionate” in the red.

Information design for the social sciences — now that’s something to encourage more of.

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Mythical Beasts & Modern Monsters

Beastly bullies, meek monsters, and why Donald Duck is finally proven totally useless.

Mythology is such a rich source of creativity and storytelling genius, full of wildly imaginative creatures — from the Minotaur to unicorns to Big Foot. Today, we’re turning to this age-old treasure chest and looking at three curious, quirky dissections of the mythical monsters ecosystem.

A FIELD GUIDE TO TALKING BEASTS

From the Bible to Tim Burton films to Budweiser commercials, anthropomorphic creatures and talking bests abound. And they’re predictably consistent — so it’s always handy to know what you’re dealing with. That way, you can come prepared for your next encounter with a large talking bird or an opinionated lizard.

Thanks to lunchbreath, one of our favorite irreverent illustrators, now you can — enter the Field Guide to Talking Beasts.

We always knew Donald Duck was a useless, pantless sucker.

MYTHICAL CREATURES MIXOLOGY CHART

It’s hard to outcool the brilliant simplicity of a good Venn diagram, with its uncanny power of illuminating and clarifying. Which is why we love this fabulous Mythical Creatures Mixology Chart, inspired by the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection of guardian beasts.

With names as hilarious as Harpy and Cockatrice, we bet some of these beasts were given countless wedgies and stuffed in the beast school lockers by the Big Bad Minotaur and his posse of, erm, bullies.

THE HIERARCHY OF MONSTERS

Speaking of hierarchy of powers, that’s no small matter in beast world. So blogger Chris Braak has done the dirty work of an elaborate who-would-win pitting and produced this simple yet not-to-be-contested Hierarchy of Monsters, based on how dangerous the monsters are against each other and to all the other monsters on the list.

So there you have it, a who’s-who, who’s-better-than-whom, my-monster-is-cooler-than-your-monster of the beast world.

And should you ever run out of mythical beings to marvel at, we can never get enough of Stefan G. Bucher’s Daily Monster, which is so good it got a book deal.

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Charting The Beatles

Some Beatles are more equal than others, or why there’s no yellow in Yellow Submarine.

We love data visualization. And we love The Beatles. Naturally, we’re all over New-York-based designer Michael Deal‘s Charting The Beatles project — an infographic exploration of the life and music of the iconic rockers, from sales statistics to personal biographies to songwriting contributions within the band.

Deal envisioned the project as a collaborative one, so there’s a Flickr pool where others can contribute their Beatles-charting exploits. There, you can find gems like Kristen E. Long’s rather convincing visual argument for The Beatles’ superior popularity over Jesus.

Besides the incredibly detailed and scholarly data revealing anything from common Beatles wisdom to little-known factoids (Did you know Ringo Starr only ever collaborated on two songs, “Dig It” and “Flying,” and “Octopus’s Garden” was the only track he wrote entirely by himself?), the project bespeaks the very richness and expanse of The Beatles’ music-turned-movement.

Charting The Beatles is the hipster answer to Christian Swinehart’s wonderfully geeky infographic dissection of Choose Your Own Adventure books. And between the richness of factual detail and the universal cultural resonance of the subject matter, it’s among the most delightful visualization projects we’ve come across in quite some time.

via Information is Beautiful

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