VISAP Pictorial - Beyond the Visual: Materiality, Memory, and Identitybookmark_border

Proteus is a large-scale installation for exploring and challenging our everyday notion of time using embodied interaction and visualization. We adapted slit-scan visualization techniques to turn timelapses into a malleable material controllable by visitors, revealing spatiotemporal patterns, juxtapositions, and narratives. We describe the process of designing the installation and share visitor evaluation insights on how immersive interactive visualization amplifies the exploration, reflection, and discussion of non-uniform representation of time.

Tracing the Greenland Ice Sheet’s ice divide from the melting margins to its two‑mile‑thick summit 700 kilometers inland, Ice Archives invites viewers to the in-between where geologic memory meets scientific foresight. The immersive, multi-sensory exhibition featuring glass and clay sculpture and projected visuals invites viewers to encounter the complexities of climate change through tactile forms, connection to the research sites and images from below the ice sheet. Based in scientific observations, here data are transformed via an artistic voice providing the opportunity for viewers to explore through science and metaphor while reflecting on the changes within this fragile landscape.

A map does what a diagram cannot: it stays. Its space can be revisited, learned, and compared; knowledge accumulates as familiarity with place. We bring this power to written language. Organized by graphic structure and semantic affiliation, our map functions as a stable landscape of Chinese characters, where every character holds one position in every text. On this ground, cartographic reading follows: poems turn into journeys, and the sound and language patterns of the Shijing (Book of Songs)—refrain, reduplication, tonal melody—become visible patterns of path and place. Guan-Guan demonstrates the mode: the anthology’s opening poem, ten movements.

Chinese names, filtered through Western transliteration, lose meaning. Identity is flattened into sound, reduced to Latin script. Not My Name and Not My Gender are interactive tools built on Chinese dictionaries and 1.2 billion Chinese names. They reveal how pinyin, the Romanized system rendering Chinese names, compresses over 8,000 characters into at most 413 syllables. This compression further complicates gender inference, especially when name-gender association is perceived as a spectrum: gender inferred from pinyin syllables retains only about 24% of the pattern in original characters. The work invites reflection on naming, language, and cultural assumptions embedded in technological systems.

The encoding of tactile properties is still underexplored in data physicalization research, with few systematic studies of tactile affordances. Using string as an expressive material for data physicalization, we present an inventory of 30 string prototypes that explore variations in tactile affordances. We evaluated these prototypes with participants to examine interpretation through touch. Participants consistently identified structural properties and articulated emotional and descriptive associations without visual input. Differences between tactile and visual interpretations suggest a productive design space for multisensory physicalizations. The resulting inventory is a step towards a vocabulary of string’s tactile affordances for designing richer data physicalizations.