ABSTRACTION TODAY

Kim Albrecht, 2025

Event

Institute of Art History & Department of Media Studies at the University of Bonn, Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (ZeM)

Theory, Design

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Data Visualization as abstract realism

The relationship between data visualization and abstraction is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, data visualization is the ultimate abstraction: it begins with a blank space onto which designers inscribe geometric symbols—lines, circles, rectangles. On the other hand, these symbols are tethered to reality, tasked with representing complex phenomena such as global COVID-19 deaths, trade Nows spanning centuries, or atmospheric CO₂ levels over millennia. In this way, data visualization operates as a form of abstract realism: removed from the concrete, yet deeply invested in rendering the real.

This talk explores the epistemic and aesthetic dimensions of data visualization, examining how abstraction shapes our perception of reality. Drawing on theoretical perspectives and a range of artistic and research-based projects, I will interrogate how data visualization constructs, distorts, and challenges the relationship between abstraction and reality. By critically engaging with its visual grammar and ideological underpinnings, this talk will reflect on the tensions inherent in making the invisible visible through abstraction.

Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary

From automated navigation to weather forecasts, data visualizations, and painting, abstraction has an undeniable presence in the contemporary world. Yet, it not only represents but also creates worlds. It is an operative concept that likewise possesses an imaginary thrust for perceiving things otherwise. As such, abstraction comes in many different forms: It is an aesthetic, a technology, an epistemology, and a practice. Therefore, it is also a political attitude, a mode of description, a tool of complexity reduction, and an instruction for intervention. Depending on its context and use, it can take on radically different connotations, ranging from dehumanizing to appealing, from affirmative to critical, from incorporated to autonomous.

Taking its cue from the different meanings and applications of abstraction, the international lecture series “Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary” is designed as an interdisciplinary endeavor with a focus on visual media and digital culture. Most digital technologies (like networks, computer simulation or artificial intelligence) and correlated practices are closely connected to different forms of abstraction on different levels. To do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, the series brings together a group of international scholars, artists, and curators who speak on abstraction today as it unfolds in fields such as art, photography, film, design, image science, visual culture studies, philosophy, and more. Grounding the inquiries into the contemporary conditions of abstraction are contributions focusing on its historical lineage, most importantly its emergence within the discourse of modernism to be understood in its global and postcolonial plurality.

PDF Abstraction Today Kim Albrecht 2025

Edited by Kim Albrecht on the 2025-12-14.