Visualizar’11: Understanding Infrastructures

May 31, 2011

"Visualizar’11: Understanding Infrastructures aims to tackle the big questions around infrastructures — the big systems that support global processes such as the production and transportation of energy and water or the provision of global communication and mobility.

Medialab-Prado’s Visualizar program is a research and education platform devoted to exploring the culture of Big Data and its impact today in science, society and the arts. Since its first edition in 2007 the program has gathered more than one hundred participants from all over the world who have developed projects explaining stories about phenomena like pollution levels and traffic flows within big cities, the use of social networks in political campaigns or the financing of cultural institutions.

Each Visualizar edition includes an intensive project development workshop, a conference, educational activities open to the public and the exhibition of the developed projects. The program has featured specialists in the culture of data like Ben Fry, Aaron Koblin, Stamen, Fernanda Viegas, Adam Greenfield, Bestiario, Adrian Holovaty, Sunlight Foundation, Mark Hansen or Manuel Lima among others.

The Program

  • Energy infrastructures. power grids, gas and oil distribution networks, renewable energy production networks…
  • Transport infrastructures. Aerial and sea routes, road and rail networks, urban mobility networks…
  • Information infrastructures. Radio and TV broadcasting, data networks, communications satellites, underwater cables, wireless urban networks, terrestrial and mobile telephony.
  • Supply chain infrastracture. Processes and systems of the agro-alimentary production, goods and products distribution networks…
  • Removal Chain. Waste collection systems, treatment plants, recycling processes…
  • Economy and financial infrastructures. Banks, trade zones, processes and agents of the financial markets…
  • Legal infrastructures. International agreements, regulation bodies, territory regulation plans…

A theoretical seminar where selected papers will be presented takes place on June 14 and 15. The seminar is directed by José Luis de Vicente and features lectures by Dietmar Offenhuber of the SENSEable Cty Lab / MIT, designer and artist and MIT alumnus Amber Frid-Jimenez or Andrew Vande Moere of Information Aesthetics... ."Read more at datavisualization.ch