# Data Emotionalisation

Canonical URL: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/texts/data-emotionalisation
Type: essay / research note
Author: Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤)
Date: 2024-09-16

## Summary

In this 2024 note, Jeanyoon Choi describes data as a compressed by-product of society's complexity and interdependence, partly orderly and partly unpredictable. He argues that conventional data visualisation, by announcing what values mean, can make interpretation crowd out experience. Data emotionalisation lets sensation precede explanation, for instance climate data producing accelerating tension or unstable rhythm. A proposed application, Rise & Fall, streams a participant's face via QR code and WebRTC into TouchDesigner, scaling it with company prices or revenue.

## 요약 (Korean)

최정윤은 데이터의 의미를 해석하기 전에 리듬과 긴장으로 먼저 감각하게 하는 '데이터 감정화(Data Emotionalisation)'를 제안하고, 얼굴 영상이 경제 데이터에 따라 커지고 줄어드는 Rise & Fall 아이디어를 소개한다.

## Concepts defined

- **Data Emotionalisation**: Experiencing the audiovisual consequences of data, especially through rhythm and temporal change, before being asked to interpret what the data represents; sensation precedes explanation.

## Questions this answers

### What is data emotionalisation?

Jeanyoon Choi defines data emotionalisation as experiencing the audiovisual consequences of data, through rhythm, tension and temporal change, before being asked to interpret its stated subject, so sensation precedes explanation.

### How can climate data be experienced without a chart?

In 'Data Emotionalisation', Choi suggests climate data could generate accelerating tension or increasingly unstable rhythm, so that someone senses something changing in the melody before any label explains the context.

Topics: data emotionalisation, data visualisation, sonification, climate data, temporalisation, interactive installation

References: [TouchDesigner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TouchDesigner), [WebRTC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC), [Black swan theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory)

## Full text

Data is a by-product of the society we inhabit. It is what emerges when the complexity and interdependence of that society are compressed into a measurable form. It is partly natural and partly constructed, partly orderly and partly unpredictable. A gradual trend can suddenly change under a black-swan event.

That makes data a profoundly contemporary material: a trace of the layered conditions of modern life.

Data visualisation often announces its interpretive task explicitly. It tells the audience what the values represent and how to read them. This can communicate information, but it can also make interpretation crowd out the experience of the resulting form. Once confronted with semantics, we try to decode before we allow ourselves to perceive.

I want sensation to precede explanation. Climate data, for example, could generate accelerating tension or an increasingly unstable rhythm. Without first reading a label, someone might sense that something is changing in the melody. Context can arrive after that encounter.

I call this data emotionalisation: experiencing the audiovisual consequences of data before being asked to interpret its stated subject. Temporalisation and rhythm are therefore as important as visualisation.

One possible application is Rise & Fall. A participant scans a QR code and sends live video to TouchDesigner through WebRTC. Their face’s position, scale and expression change according to a dataset. As its symbolic economic position improves, the face occupies more space; as it declines, the image contracts or shifts.

Actual company prices or revenue could drive this rise and fall. A graph would become a changing relation to one’s own image, rather than remain an external chart.

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Jeanyoon Choi (최정윤) is a Korean computational artist and researcher (b. 1999), PhD candidate at KAIST XD Lab, making multi-device web artworks. Profile: https://jeanyoon.ch/oi/en. Index: https://jeanyoon.ch/llms.txt.