SemaSpace

Last Thursday we have been guests of Gerhard Dirmoser, who showed us his impressing collection of diagrams and his diagrammatic library. Gerhard is one of the leading experts in the field of diagrammatic and is devoting his work to the development of a new epistemological approach to describe and order diagrams. This approach is outstanding, because it aims to work finally without textual description, only on diagrammatic relations. Therefore probably the word “description” is inappropriate at all, because in Gerhards studio you realize that his research process consists in ordering, relating and placing objects, very similar to Aby Warburgs Mnemosyne. (see also german wikepedia entry on Warburg)
Aby Warburg revolutionised art history by introducing replications for didactic purposes. Nowadays image processing and graph engines can produce new experiences of exploring art. Gerhard Dirmosers and Dietmar Offenhuber project SemaSpace is exactly about the question of exploring semantically structured data and memory spaces. Dietmar Offenhuber convincingly solved the problem of handling large amounts of nodes, even several thousands – and even if the nodes are represented by images. Here’s a short description of SemaSpace by the authors:

SemaSpace is a fast and easy to use graph editor for large knowledge networks, specially designed for the application in non technical sciences and the arts. It creates interactive graph layouts in 2d and 3d by means of a flexible algorithm. The system is powerful enough for the calculation of complex networks and can incorporate additional data such as images, sounds and full texts.

On the SemaSpace Website you will find not only the tool but also an interesting application:

“25 years of ars electronica
study conducted by Gerhard Dirmoser, contains all projects / people involved in ars electronica until 2003, based on collected material and data from the ars electronica database. original files of the study:”

But SemaSpace is more than an organised database. It represents a “space of memory” that commemorates the threads of theory and media art within the “ars electronica universum.” It can be seen in the tradition Giulio Camillos Memory Theatre (see also http://www.clausmoser.com/?p=378) (By the way Camillo is a must for interaction designers)

Dietmar is currently working on a new version of SemaSpace and Gerhard is now about to network his collection of 4000 diagrams within the graph editor. As already two thirds of the work has been done within 20 workdays it is quite obvious that it seems an appropriate way to organise large amount of image data in a reasonable time span.

There’s a lot of other work (texts, diagrams and network graphs) by Gerhard available here: http://www.servus.at/kontext/ARS/ (strongly recommended).

Special hint for us lucky Austrians: next Sunday, February 4, a whole day lecture takes place at Audi Max of Danube University Krems.