Sara Diamond of the Banff Center for the Arts organized a panel filled with interesting insights and experimental art. Visualization, Diamond says, is the preparation of raw data into cooked forms, for digestion by information diners. Viz ironically aims to get us closer to nature by digitally manipulating and presenting data. How real is viz that tries to represent that which we cannot immediately sense? "Perhaps the fluidity of interpretation is thick, the ice of reality thin." The entry of artists to the field is bringing seismic waves to the ice, she says, and she introduced some great projects resulting from artists collaborating with (or wresting control from) scientists.

Sheelagh Carpendale of the University of Calgary pointed out that many scientists can easily read their own visualizations, being familiar with the subject matter, but must explain them to others. This is the difference between viewing and reading. Just as there are different types of reading methods, so might there be different methods of reading visualizations. Blurring, for example, can actually help sometimes, to discern overall patterns.

Particularly compelling was Joshua Portway's talk on his Blackshoals stock market planetarium project, which began at a restaurant in London's financial district, and ended up at the Tate Gallery. A real-time feed of financial data from Reuters was transformed into a dome-filling visualization, with stars representing companies, and artificial life creatures feeding on market activity. It was intended as a kind of joke, for stock traders to look out, like the gods of mythology, on the universe they were manipulating. But it was taken very seriously by traders and would-be corporate sponsors.

Portway expounded on the erotic and religious appeals of scientific visualizations, as well as scientific institutions like the London Natural History Museum that awed him as a child. Museums, he says, come from a colonial mindset -- that they could collect the whole world and stuff it into a single building, to make it understandable. Visiting them is not far from visiting a church, or a virtual world -- the feeling of being very small, unimportant, adrift and a bit lost in a sea of data. Portway says that, when it comes to visualizations, we seek the same feeling.

Speaking about human-technology interaction, Portway noted how video game players "learn another body." They learn to physically sense, and often act out, the physics of the game. "They can map between those two worlds so intensely On the first day of the Blackshoals installation, in March 2000, the planetarium full of stars, each representing the market activity of a particular company, went nearly black as the markets dropped precipitously. Stars fell from the sky, and a-life creatures underwent mass extinctions (the ones that evolved to be clever ones died, while those that hibernated and did nothing survived.) Portway, picking up Diamond's seismic metaphor, said, "To me, the stock market felt like tectonic plates moving under the earth -- you never feel them moving until there's an earthquake. You hear about these huge forces happening on television, but you never notice them."

Sha Xin-Wei of Georgia Institute of Technology is trying to keep alive the form of writing with experiments in using gesture to create 3D objects. He emphasizes the performative aspect of drawing -- making meaning thorugh gesture. An implementation put users into sensor-fitted costumes, in an enclosed space in which their movements and interactions transformed the visual and aural architecture. He found that users became familiar with their new, wired identities, and learned to communicate with others in new ways.