The Anti-Sublime Ideal in New Media
by Lev Manovich
[Visualizations] carry the promise of rendering phenomena that are beyond the scale of human senses into something that is within our reach, something visible and tangible ... This promise makes data mapping into the exact opposite of the Romantic art concerned with the sublime. In contrast, data visualisation art is concerned with the anti-sublime. If Romantic artists thought of certain phenomena and effects as un-representable, as something which goes beyond the limits of human senses and reason, data visualisation artists target the exact opposite: to map such phenomena into a representation whose scale is comparable to the scales of human perception and cognition.
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