PROJECT# 4 – Paper
Martin Wattenberg has a variety of skills and knowledge. Some are art based, and some are not. His educational/professional background is very diverse. I will discuss topics of his life and art, and why he is where he is today.
Martin is a computer scientist/artist and a mathematician. Wattenberg studies data associated with cultural significance. He uses such data to create useful and informative visuals. Other people that are involved in data collection and interpretation are usually number savvy scientists. Works he has created have been shown at the Museum of Natural Art. Martin is about 39 years old now, and until his mid 20’s he thought only of Math. In his last year at University of California, Berkeley, for a doctorate in Mathematics he began to divert his interests in other directions. He fell in love with the idea of using computer graphics and the Internet to display information in visually interactive ways. An early example of this is his well-known “Map of the Market”.
Martin Wattenberg became one of the founding members of the IBM Visual Communications Lab in 2002. There he continued to create visual representations of data. “The Baby Name Wizard” was an Internet work he placed on his wives website to display baby names becoming more and more popular. Also, “Many Eyes” is a website at which users can input data and create their own interactive visuals. Yet another of his explorations was that of the “Fleshmap” which displays relationships between the human body and its verbal and visual aspects. The visual he made explained how words in songs relating to the body are used. Often the word eyes are used country songs, where the word relating to tush is used in hip-hop songs.
Wattenberg’s art has also been exhibited in other places. Such as the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York Museum of Modern Art. He is currently living in Winchester, Massachusetts; and was born in Amherst, MA. I was intrigued and visually attracted to the art he has created, and I think his approach using art is very unique.
