Mitchell Whitelaw
Biographic Data
| ID | 339450 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mitchell Whitelaw |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mitchell |
| FAMILY NAME | Whitelaw |
| SIGNATURE | WHITELAW M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Canberra |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4714-8507 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Designing for biodiversity data in place: Species, encounters, and interfaces
Species occurrence data, which records the presence of an organism at a point in space and time, is central to environmental science and its opening up to new forms of participation such as citizen science. Such data are increasingly aggregated and mobilised, reaching diverse audiences. This paper addresses the critical role of interface design in this context. How might interfaces be accountable to the complex and rich relationality of biodivers…
The Sound of Water: Sensing a Wetland Intervention Through Interactive Environmental Audio
The Sound of Water ( https://flow-mer.org.au/napnap ) microsite documents an environmental intervention at Nap Nap Swamp, a wetland in the western reaches of Australia's Murrumbidgee River. A collaboration between a designer (Whitelaw) and an ecologist (Wassens), it was supported by the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office. We use audiovisual data storytelling to engage audiences with Nap Nap as it transitions from a dry to wet state. Focusing…
Biodiversity data as public environmental media: Citizen science projects, national databases and data visualizations
Through a combination of scientific and community activity, our environment is increasingly registered and documented as data. Given the expanding breadth of this digital domain, it is crucial that scholars consider the problems it presents as well as its affirmative potential. This article, arising from collaboration between a practitioner and theorist in digital design and a film and screen scholar with expertise in documentary and environmenta…
Mashups and Matters of Concern: Generative Approaches to Digital Collections
This article discusses two practical experiments in remaking collections. Drifter (2016) and Succession (2014) build on the affordances of machine-readable collections and APIs to harvest large datasets from diverse sources, and show how these sources can be re-deployed to address complex spatiotemporal sites. These projects demonstrate the potential of a mashup-like generative approach based on sampling and recombination. Such approaches generat…
George Oates: Making and Remaking Collections Online
George Oates is a web designer, producer and developer who has been working with digital collections since 2003. She was one the founding team of Flickr, and the originator of Flickr Commons. She currently heads heritage design studio Good, Form & Spectacle, working with institutions including the British Museum, the Wellcome Library and the V&A. In this interview with Mitchell Whitelaw, Oates discusses her developing practice in making and remak…
How we draw texts: A review of approaches to text visualization and exploration
This paper presents a review of approaches to text visualization and exploration. Text visualization and exploration, we argue, constitute a subfield of data visualization, and are fuelled by the advances being made in text analysis research and by the growing amount of accessible data in text format. We propose an original classification for a total of 49 cases based on the visual features of the approaches adopted, identified using an inductive…
Ten Questions Concerning Generative Computer Art
In this paper the authors pose 10 questions they consider the most important for understanding generative computer art. For each question, the authors briefly discuss its implications and suggest how it might form the basis for further discussion
Watching the Sky
Peer-reviewed
Synesthesia and Cross-Modality in Contemporary Audiovisuals
This paper considers contemporary practice in “fused” or transcoded audiovisual art, focusing on the work of Australian artists Robin Fox and Andrew Gadow. In this practice sound and image are tightly linked by a cross-wiring of media signals. Synesthesia is often invoked around such work, proposing a parallel between perceptual and technical cross-wiring. This synesthetic analogy provides a historical context as well as an analytic frame; it is …
Listening to the Mind Listening: An Analysis of Sonification Reviews, Designs and Correspondences
Listening to the Mind Listening (LML) explored whether sonifications can be more than just “noise” in terms of perceived information and musical experience. The project generated an unprecedented body of 27 multichannel sonifications of the same dataset by 38 composers. The design of each sonification was explicitly documented, and there are 88 analytical reviews of the works. The public concert presenting 10 of these sonifications at the Sydney …
Listening to the Mind Listening
The Listening to the Mind Listening concert was a practice-led research project to explore the idea that we might hear information patterns in the sonified recordings of brain activity, and to investigate the aesthetics of sonifications of the same data set by different composers. This world-first concert of data sonifications was staged at the Sydney Opera House Studio on the evening of 6 July 2004 to a capacity audience of more than 350 neurosc…
The mirage of real-time algorithmic synaesthesia: Some compositional mechanisms and research agendas in computer music and sonification
This article looks at algorithmic synaesthesia, a form of sonic intermedia involving synchronous computer-mediated manipulation of sound and image. In algorithmic synaesthesia extensively shared features are created in the two media. Examples of such work by austraLYSIS and others are discussed. What an audience member can cognitively access in such synaesthesia is considered: creators of intermedia works may overestimate this. The fact that a ma…
Sound Particles and Microsonic Materialism
The cultural imagination of data is crucial in a society increasingly enmeshed in the datasphere. In writing around recent experimental audio (“microsound”), sound data are frequently described in terms of matter, through the figure of the sound particle. Here this material metaphor is examined in detail, and critiqued for misrepresenting the crucial relationship between sound, matter and data, which is at the core of this field of practice
The Abstract Organism: Towards a Prehistory for A-Life Art
The author examines historical precedents for contemporary art practice using artificial life, in particular in the work of Paul Klee and Kasimir Malevich. Similarities are identified between artificial life and the philosophical tradition of organicism; specific examples from Klee and Malevich indicate that those artists were engaged in a form of creative organicist thought that imagined the realization of living structures in artificial media
Tom Ray's Hammer: Emergence and Excess in A-Life Art
Art using artificial life techniques is often founded on a desire for emergence, a desire to have novel, unexpected, or unpredictable results spring from a controlled, designed system. The author explores emergence, briefly tracing the history of debate around the term before using the work of Peter Cariani to discuss the problems involved in describing the results of computational processes as emergent. The relevance of these points to a-life ar…
Biodiversity data as public environmental media: Citizen science projects, national databases and data visualizations
Through a combination of scientific and community activity, our environment is increasingly registered and documented as data. Given the expanding breadth of this digital domain, it is crucial that scholars consider the problems it presents as well as its affirmative potential. This article, arising from collaboration between a practitioner and theorist in digital design and a film and screen scholar with expertise in documentary and environmenta…
Mashups and Matters of Concern: Generative Approaches to Digital Collections
This article discusses two practical experiments in remaking collections. Drifter (2016) and Succession (2014) build on the affordances of machine-readable collections and APIs to harvest large datasets from diverse sources, and show how these sources can be re-deployed to address complex spatiotemporal sites. These projects demonstrate the potential of a mashup-like generative approach based on sampling and recombination. Such approaches generat…
Ten Questions Concerning Generative Computer Art
In this paper the authors pose 10 questions they consider the most important for understanding generative computer art. For each question, the authors briefly discuss its implications and suggest how it might form the basis for further discussion
Synesthesia and Cross-Modality in Contemporary Audiovisuals
This paper considers contemporary practice in “fused” or transcoded audiovisual art, focusing on the work of Australian artists Robin Fox and Andrew Gadow. In this practice sound and image are tightly linked by a cross-wiring of media signals. Synesthesia is often invoked around such work, proposing a parallel between perceptual and technical cross-wiring. This synesthetic analogy provides a historical context as well as an analytic frame; it is …
Sound Particles and Microsonic Materialism
The cultural imagination of data is crucial in a society increasingly enmeshed in the datasphere. In writing around recent experimental audio (“microsound”), sound data are frequently described in terms of matter, through the figure of the sound particle. Here this material metaphor is examined in detail, and critiqued for misrepresenting the crucial relationship between sound, matter and data, which is at the core of this field of practice
The Sound of Water: Sensing a Wetland Intervention Through Interactive Environmental Audio
The Sound of Water ( https://flow-mer.org.au/napnap ) microsite documents an environmental intervention at Nap Nap Swamp, a wetland in the western reaches of Australia's Murrumbidgee River. A collaboration between a designer (Whitelaw) and an ecologist (Wassens), it was supported by the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office. We use audiovisual data storytelling to engage audiences with Nap Nap as it transitions from a dry to wet state. Focusing…
The mirage of real-time algorithmic synaesthesia: Some compositional mechanisms and research agendas in computer music and sonification
This article looks at algorithmic synaesthesia, a form of sonic intermedia involving synchronous computer-mediated manipulation of sound and image. In algorithmic synaesthesia extensively shared features are created in the two media. Examples of such work by austraLYSIS and others are discussed. What an audience member can cognitively access in such synaesthesia is considered: creators of intermedia works may overestimate this. The fact that a ma…
The Abstract Organism: Towards a Prehistory for A-Life Art
The author examines historical precedents for contemporary art practice using artificial life, in particular in the work of Paul Klee and Kasimir Malevich. Similarities are identified between artificial life and the philosophical tradition of organicism; specific examples from Klee and Malevich indicate that those artists were engaged in a form of creative organicist thought that imagined the realization of living structures in artificial media
Tom Ray's Hammer: Emergence and Excess in A-Life Art
Art using artificial life techniques is often founded on a desire for emergence, a desire to have novel, unexpected, or unpredictable results spring from a controlled, designed system. The author explores emergence, briefly tracing the history of debate around the term before using the work of Peter Cariani to discuss the problems involved in describing the results of computational processes as emergent. The relevance of these points to a-life ar…
Tom Ray's Hammer: Emergence and Excess in A-Life Art
Art using artificial life techniques is often founded on a desire for emergence, a desire to have novel, unexpected, or unpredictable results spring from a controlled, designed system. The author explores emergence, briefly tracing the history of debate around the term before using the work of Peter Cariani to discuss the problems involved in describing the results of computational processes as emergent. The relevance of these points to a-life ar…
The Abstract Organism: Towards a Prehistory for A-Life Art
The author examines historical precedents for contemporary art practice using artificial life, in particular in the work of Paul Klee and Kasimir Malevich. Similarities are identified between artificial life and the philosophical tradition of organicism; specific examples from Klee and Malevich indicate that those artists were engaged in a form of creative organicist thought that imagined the realization of living structures in artificial media
Sound Particles and Microsonic Materialism
The cultural imagination of data is crucial in a society increasingly enmeshed in the datasphere. In writing around recent experimental audio (“microsound”), sound data are frequently described in terms of matter, through the figure of the sound particle. Here this material metaphor is examined in detail, and critiqued for misrepresenting the crucial relationship between sound, matter and data, which is at the core of this field of practice
Listening to the Mind Listening: An Analysis of Sonification Reviews, Designs and Correspondences
Listening to the Mind Listening (LML) explored whether sonifications can be more than just “noise” in terms of perceived information and musical experience. The project generated an unprecedented body of 27 multichannel sonifications of the same dataset by 38 composers. The design of each sonification was explicitly documented, and there are 88 analytical reviews of the works. The public concert presenting 10 of these sonifications at the Sydney …
Listening to the Mind Listening
The Listening to the Mind Listening concert was a practice-led research project to explore the idea that we might hear information patterns in the sonified recordings of brain activity, and to investigate the aesthetics of sonifications of the same data set by different composers. This world-first concert of data sonifications was staged at the Sydney Opera House Studio on the evening of 6 July 2004 to a capacity audience of more than 350 neurosc…
The mirage of real-time algorithmic synaesthesia: Some compositional mechanisms and research agendas in computer music and sonification
This article looks at algorithmic synaesthesia, a form of sonic intermedia involving synchronous computer-mediated manipulation of sound and image. In algorithmic synaesthesia extensively shared features are created in the two media. Examples of such work by austraLYSIS and others are discussed. What an audience member can cognitively access in such synaesthesia is considered: creators of intermedia works may overestimate this. The fact that a ma…
Watching the Sky
Peer-reviewed
Synesthesia and Cross-Modality in Contemporary Audiovisuals
This paper considers contemporary practice in “fused” or transcoded audiovisual art, focusing on the work of Australian artists Robin Fox and Andrew Gadow. In this practice sound and image are tightly linked by a cross-wiring of media signals. Synesthesia is often invoked around such work, proposing a parallel between perceptual and technical cross-wiring. This synesthetic analogy provides a historical context as well as an analytic frame; it is …
How we draw texts: A review of approaches to text visualization and exploration
This paper presents a review of approaches to text visualization and exploration. Text visualization and exploration, we argue, constitute a subfield of data visualization, and are fuelled by the advances being made in text analysis research and by the growing amount of accessible data in text format. We propose an original classification for a total of 49 cases based on the visual features of the approaches adopted, identified using an inductive…
Ten Questions Concerning Generative Computer Art
In this paper the authors pose 10 questions they consider the most important for understanding generative computer art. For each question, the authors briefly discuss its implications and suggest how it might form the basis for further discussion
Mashups and Matters of Concern: Generative Approaches to Digital Collections
This article discusses two practical experiments in remaking collections. Drifter (2016) and Succession (2014) build on the affordances of machine-readable collections and APIs to harvest large datasets from diverse sources, and show how these sources can be re-deployed to address complex spatiotemporal sites. These projects demonstrate the potential of a mashup-like generative approach based on sampling and recombination. Such approaches generat…
George Oates: Making and Remaking Collections Online
George Oates is a web designer, producer and developer who has been working with digital collections since 2003. She was one the founding team of Flickr, and the originator of Flickr Commons. She currently heads heritage design studio Good, Form & Spectacle, working with institutions including the British Museum, the Wellcome Library and the V&A. In this interview with Mitchell Whitelaw, Oates discusses her developing practice in making and remak…
Biodiversity data as public environmental media: Citizen science projects, national databases and data visualizations
Through a combination of scientific and community activity, our environment is increasingly registered and documented as data. Given the expanding breadth of this digital domain, it is crucial that scholars consider the problems it presents as well as its affirmative potential. This article, arising from collaboration between a practitioner and theorist in digital design and a film and screen scholar with expertise in documentary and environmenta…
The Sound of Water: Sensing a Wetland Intervention Through Interactive Environmental Audio
The Sound of Water ( https://flow-mer.org.au/napnap ) microsite documents an environmental intervention at Nap Nap Swamp, a wetland in the western reaches of Australia's Murrumbidgee River. A collaboration between a designer (Whitelaw) and an ecologist (Wassens), it was supported by the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office. We use audiovisual data storytelling to engage audiences with Nap Nap as it transitions from a dry to wet state. Focusing…
Designing for biodiversity data in place: Species, encounters, and interfaces
Species occurrence data, which records the presence of an organism at a point in space and time, is central to environmental science and its opening up to new forms of participation such as citizen science. Such data are increasingly aggregated and mobilised, reaching diverse audiences. This paper addresses the critical role of interface design in this context. How might interfaces be accountable to the complex and rich relationality of biodivers…
Computer Science (11 works) · Art (8 works) · Artificial Intelligence (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Visual arts (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · History (4 works)