Seeing with the screen

The new technologies of visualization have turned the computer screen into a universal and highly versatile interface for the representation of scientific knowledge. Images, once regarded as mere illustrations of primarily theoretical and experimental advances, have moved centre stage where knowledge is generated from the confluence of vast amounts of raw and unintelligible data. The computer screen has advanced to the position of the “thinking eye,” the central node where data culminate and transform into visual information. Today’s sciences are “predominantly visual,” argued the British art historian Martin Kemp already ten years ago and identified the emergence of computer graphics as the common cause for it [9]. Such a statement may provoke skepticism but there can be little doubt about three important shifts in relation to the significance of knowledge visualization; (a) the ascendancy of visualization as a transdisciplinary phenomenon, typical for many different knowledge domains; (b) the increased importance or dominance of visualization because of digital technologies of representation; and finally, (c) the reversal of the traditional hierarchy between theory and visualization. Taken together, these shifts account for something which comes close to a revolution of scientific knowledge; not only has the importance of visualization been rising and permeated in ever more knowledge domains, the very object of visualization, its objects, the phenomena and the knowledge do no longer exist independent of the processes of visualization. An investigation of the visualization of knowledge has to take into account that the knowledge to be visualized does no longer precede the very process of visualization but co-evolves with the image making. Strategies of data display and visualization co-construct knowledge.