Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945

Experimental Futures

by Orit Halpern

Beautiful Data is both a history of big data and interactivity, and a sophisticated meditation on ideas about vision and cognition in the second half of the twentieth century. Contending that our forms of attention, observation, and truth are contingent and contested, Orit Halpern historicizes the ways that we are trained, and train ourselves, to observe and analyze the world. Tracing the postwar impact of cybernetics and the communication sciences on the social and human sciences, design, arts, and urban planning, she finds a radical shift in attitudes toward recording and displaying information. These changed attitudes produced what she calls communicative objectivity: new forms of observation, rationality, and economy based on the management and analysis of data. Halpern complicates assumptions about the value of data and visualization, arguing that changes in how we manage and train perception, and define reason and intelligence, are also transformations in governmentality. She also challenges the paradoxical belief that we are experiencing a crisis of attention caused by digital media, a crisis that can be resolved only through intensified media consumption.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Design, Technology, Anthropology, Urbanism, Science

352 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2014

About the author

Orit Halpern is Assistant Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College.

Reviews

[RoaringRatalouille · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an attempt to historicize several contemporary obsessions: smart cities, data visualization, interfaces, and the idea that data are "beautfiul", just to name a few. In that sense, the book deploys the Foucauldian methodology of writing a "history of the present". Its broader aim and strategy will seem familiar to people who have engaged with the work of Foucault.

The book's biggest strength is that it innovatively and convincingly links together seemingly disparate fields: it shows how the science of cybernetics - and its reformulations of what "vision" and "reason" - is intricately connected to perspectives on politics, urban planning, and architecture. This provides a lot of food for thought. More generally, the book is effective at putting our present condition into a historical context and showing what is contingent about it. It draws from diverse theorists, mostly Deleuze, Benjamin, and Foucault, which often led to interesting insights.

At the same time, however, the book sometimes fails to pin down the arguments it is making. Or when it does, the explanations did not really make sense to me, or expected too much of the reader. Even if you are used to reading dense texts and theory, this book is really wordy and sometimes overly so - which led to me having to skip many sections. Also, especially in chapter 3, there are lot of paragraphs that are duplicated - which was sometimes confusing.

I recommend this book if you are interested in cybernetics, practical uses of Foucauldian analysis, and a historicized account of why we are so obsessed with data today. But beware that the book is not straightforward by any means and can sometimes be quite a hassle to read. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very cool book. Beautiful Data sets out to defamiliarize current discourses around data, visualization, and interfaces by tracing the history of their emergence. Halpern does this by turning to major figures in cybernetics, design, art, and social science, examining how they reformulated older modernist concepts of vision, memory, and structure, while developing new emphases on sensation, prediction, and process.

While the book specifically focuses on people adjacent to the rise of digital computing, the kinds of concepts it aims to historicize have a life beyond that particular milieux. An interesting part of the book is showing how intellectual formations that have been celebrated for their liberatory potential (e.g. a valorization of multi-sensory embodiment over a hegemony of vision) enjoyed a very cozy relationship to people of varying ideological bents and institutional affiliations. This helps to explain how it is that, say, so many figures of Silicon Valley fame could consider themselves enamored with, say, the Frankfurt School.

There were times when I wasn’t sure what Halpern was talking about, for two different reasons. The first is Halpern’s style of writing. She has a penchant for lists, and the elements in the lists never really stay stable. I felt at times inundated by concepts, but given the book’s interest in the concept of data inundation, this may have been intentional. The second is that the book deals with parts of the world in which we live that are so ubiquitous, it’s hard to identify them as subjects of discourse at all. Example: she talks about an obsession with data visualization as a democratic virtue. It took me a while to match “obsession with data visualization” with any of my own experience, but once the lightbulb went off, it went off. Elaborate New York Times infographics praised for the elegance with which they present the facts. Whole classes taught about how to use graphics to make data intelligible - and pretty. My sense is that when it comes to histories of the present, this kind of confusion is more of a feature than a bug. Withholding a full five stars because it was disorienting, but giving four stars because the disorientation felt like part of the point, and I enjoyed it.

The book also has an interesting psychoanalytic analysis of the various figures and movements it probes, which I liked, especially since part of the argument Halpern is making is that cybernetics self-consciously defined itself in opposition to psychoanalysis. eg she writes about how cybernetics “repressed” modernist concerns about recording experience, shifting focus and anxiety away from memory (“what if I forget?”) and towards processing (“what is the algorithm/process/pattern that makes this all meaningful?”).

This review risks being overly deferent to Halpern’s obvious erudition. But the book is dazzling. I feel humbled by it.

[YL · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author writes some very annoying sentences, as if she believed that preponderence made for significance. But, her eclectic (sometimes messy) mind is on display here, the text is enriched by many well chosen examples of cybernetics implemented. The author's grasp of other areas of thought (COntinental Philosophy, History of Mathematics, Psychoanalysis) at times seems shallow, even infuriating.

For example, at one point, she writes "If a half century earlier Sigmund Freud had diagnosed schizophrenia as the result of one communicative structure -- the Oedipal complex..." This is in fact, not true. Freud did not work with Schizophrenic patients, and moreover quibbled with Bleuler on whether Schizophrenia was a real diagnostic category. Freud's only sustained engagement with Schizophrenia in his ouevre comes in his work with the "Case of Schreber", which was not based on work with schreber (shcreber was dead, I think), but on schreber's memoirs. Psychoanalytic engagement with Schizophrenia was basically anathema in Psychoanalysis, also, after Freud's break with Jung. Its status has always been fringe in Anglo-American practice. The author's insistence on a revisionist reading doesn't seem entirely due to ignorance, however. Frequent and repeated insertion of references to Deleuze and Guatari seem to be the source.

[Aivaras Žukauskas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting book, putting forward some intriguing ideas about the nature and logic of our perception. Although focusing on cybernetics, urbanism and art from the 50s-70s, a lot of the analysis is very much applicable to our time, especially in terms of our increasingly mediatized perceptions on social networks and the Internet in general.

A note of warning though: the book gets wordy at points, which is quite annoying. To a more skeptical mind it may even seem that the author is trying to hide the lack of clarity of her own thought or points put forward. Fortunately, I am not in that camp, bu I can easily see how some people get there.

[Braden Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clever, cute, and erudite. Everyone needs to read Halpern

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is bursting at the seams!!

[Lee Barry]

Cybernetics is super-relevant now in art.
Obviously it's nothing new but lots of new insights can emerge from it.