In “Reading Time Across Words and Numbers: Visualization Projects,” now on view in COCA’s Millstone Gallery, Heather Corcoran, director of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, considers how the informational, the textual, and the visual can record the passing of time.
The exhibition is a mix of representations of time-based data lifted from sea and sky, and works based in literature, integrated with numerical data. There are timelines of literary history and visualizations of texts, including poems, historical and fictional excerpts, and short stories. Digital and letterpress examples are included.
One piece, “Six Conversations,” visualizes the complete texts of six short stories (including one by recent visiting writer Joy Williams) about female protagonists navigating their identities through dialogues with the people they encounter. Corcoran’s visualization plots the characters’ conversations and physical locations. The intent is to spur cross-disciplinary discussion between fiction and visualization — and to explore what happens when six complete texts are viewed on a single surface.
“Much of my work explores how visual design does a job, how it accomplishes real work in communicating, educating, even persuading,” Corcoran said. “The works in this exhibition have some of those functional elements in that they aspire to clarity, but ultimately, they search for a poetics of visual information. I am interested in the way that data visualization can sit between art as cultural artifact and design as functional tool.”
Comments and respectful dialogue are encouraged, but content will be moderated. Please, no personal attacks, obscenity or profanity, selling of commercial products, or endorsements of political candidates or positions. We reserve the right to remove any inappropriate comments. We also cannot address individual medical concerns or provide medical advice in this forum.