Visualization and Reality

A planetarium colleague of mine posted a comment on Facebook about how he was accused of “faking data” as he described immersive storytelling on their institution’s dome through visualization.  Essentially, he was using star motion as a metaphor for the passage of time (as he explained it). Since I write and produce fulldome shows, the accusation and his explanation piqued my interest. I use visualizations in all my work (fulldome, books, articles, etc.) and it never once occurred to me to think of it as “fake”. If it’s based on data, what’s fake? What’s real?

OF COURSE, ALL of what we show on the dome is not real. It’s based on data.  Every planetarium instrument (whether opto-mechanical or digital) does this. Whether they show pinpoints of light recreating the positions of stars in the actual sky or something as complex as a flight through a nebula, planetariums are among the vanguard of the theaters using data to recreate reality. The minute I take my Digistar and put it into traveling mode, I’m recreating what it might be like if I could engage my starship at Warp 9 (or whatever speed limit the Federation is allowing now) and fly among the stars. I’m simulating flight through space AND time. Just as my colleague was intending to communicate with his video clip and demonstration. So, I guess I’m a little puzzled by the accusation, especially since it came from another planetarian presumably used to seeing star motion on a dome.

It’s also intriguing because this week I’m judging a group of videos for a science film festival, and without their good visualizations  of everything from weather events to dinosaurs and comets, these films wouldn’t be nearly as interesting (both scientifically and as vehicles for storytelling) as most of them are. So, let’s talk about visualization.

Visualization is an Important Tool

Visualization steps in where imagery ends (or needs help). In astronomy (which I studied and did research in during my grad school years), imagery is important. Obviously, actual images of an object or process give us “real” information about it.  That’s where the observatories are invaluable. But, sometimes we don’t have imaging data. Sometimes our data is in non-visual wavelengths of light (such as radio data).  We can’t perceive those emissions, with our eyes, but that doesn’t mean the objects or events don’t exist. And, because we are a highly visual species, seeing something is a way of learning about it.

This is where visualization is a HUGE asset in learning about the cosmos. Astronomers routinely take data and graph it — that’s one way to figure out what the data are saying. It can be a spectrum of a star’s variability or its motion through space or a chart of its magnetic fields or many other aspects of the star. The next step is to take that chart or graph and visualize it in an approachable way. They create something that conveys visually to the viewer what that star might look like as it does its thing. This is the heart of visualization.

Science visualization today uses data to create visions of places and objects we have no way of traveling to and seeing in our lifetimes. So, for example, a visualizer has data from Hubble Space Telescope or the Spitzer Space Telescope or Kepler, or any of many other observatories, and uses it to create what that object or event might look like. The Orion Nebula is a great example — from Hubble and other data sets, visualizer Frank Summers and a team of artists at the Space Telescope Science Institute created an amazing fly-through of the central portion of the Orion Nebula. In it, we see the clouds of gas and dust, as well as protoplanetary disks. Now, none of us has a chance of ever making that flight, but based on data, we can see what it might look like if we could. It’s as authentic an experience as you’re likely to get in your lifetime, based on what we know about the nebula. In fact, I’ve used this viz in my own fulldome show about Hubble, and it works quite well.

Visualization is a great communicator. In addition to showing us data in more understandable terms, it also helps us understand the passage of time. The visual cues it uses are straight out of the playbook of visual cues and metaphor. In our case, moving stars can stand in for the passage through space and/or the passage of time. It’s merely an animation of what would actually happen if you go really fast or speed up time (respectively). Digital planetariums can show us the motions of stars through time; opto-mechanical ones can take us through a 24-hour day or a year in a very short time by turning on diurnal motion. These are, in fact, very standard methods planetarians have used for decades within the limitations of their instruments.

Authenticity and Visualization

Visualization in science incorporates not just data, but metaphor, to impart meaning and understanding. To argue that visualization is somehow faking data is really puzzling. But the weird accusation my colleague faced reminds me of these deep philosophical discussions we had in one of my grad school classes called Visual Communication. (I did a masters’ in science journalism, which meant I did graduate-level studies of verbal and visual communication at the same time I was studying the finer points of planetary science and stellar physics, etc.)  Our discussions began with the role of imagery in media and education.

That brought us to the whole concept of  “authenticity”. This is a slippery one because at the heart of the discussion was the idea that you couldn’t possibly have an authentic experience of an event or object unless you actually were “there”. And, I’m going to have to hit the high points here, since a full discussion of “authenticity” in art and media is the subject of many textbooks!  Discussions of authenticity usually start with the question: is it better to experience the event (art, music, political rally, etc.) in person, or to read about it/learn about it in a classroom/newspaper/movie/cartoon, etc.?  There’s no one right answer, as it turns out. But the discussions are endless and, as my friend found out, they lead to strange questions about the use of data in a fulldome video.

To give you a flavor of where the argument of authenticity, take the idea of appreciating the painting La Gioconda (Mona Lisa). In some art and media crit circles, it was (probably still is) argued that you can’t truly appreciate that painting unless you’re standing right there in front of it in the Louvre. The idea being that you have to experience its current “reality”.

You can probably see a hole in that logic large enough to throw Leonardo da Vinco through with enough room for his easel, too. To wit: if you really wanted the AUTHENTIC experience, you’d need to either BE the artist, or BE there as he painted it, or be or know the model —whose name was Lisa del Giocondo Gherardini. Or, you should see it in the studio where he originally painted. The fact that it’s in the Louvre is merely an accident of history, and its place in the museum doesn’t impart any authenticity to it. Seeing it IN the Louvre does give you an authentic experience of seeing in the Louvre, but that’s a different discussion.

In point of fact, you can study up on the painting before you go the Louvre and that affects your appreciation in one way. You can see it online or in a textbook or a reproduction, study up on it, and it generates another kind of appreciation. If you can’t go to France, then your authentic experience is as authentic as the one for the person who does get to go.  It really comes down to whose definition of “authentic” you want to go with.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t travel and see these things. And, these days, if an artist wanted to take La Gioconda and animate her telling us her life story and how she came to be part of da Vinci’s work, that animation would NOT be any less “real” or “authentic” than the original. It would tell us something we didn’t know before, showing us a side of the painting we couldn’t possibly get by simply looking at it in the Louvre.

The same thing happens in music criticism and appreciation circles, too. Some years ago (and probably now, for all I know), there were HUGE discussions in music circles about whether or not recorded music was “authentic” as compared to the live concert experience.  In my mind, they’re both different experiences. In fact, if I want to hear just the music and appreciate its subtleties, the concert experience today (with all its annoyances) is the LAST thing I’d want, unless I had some special reason for wanting to hear it live.  Oddly enough, one of the most recent concerts I went to was by Kraftwerk, which is largely computerized and features four musicians going through the presets (as it were) on a stage with multiple video screens showing content. It was no less an authentic experience than sitting at home listening to the music. In one setting, we had the full social experience with added video; in listening to it at home, I get to focus on the music.

I’m married to a musician who specializes in space music, and it’s all a studio creation. Does the fact that it’s not performed in front of a live audience make it less authentic as music? Ask his fans. Ask the folks who have used it in their productions, or heard in our shows and wrote to ask how they could get it.  It’s not truly music FROM space, but it is music that describes (aurally) what he thinks space is like. Authentic? Yes? No?

Bringing it Back to the Dome

Getting back to visualization of space, stars, planets, and galaxies, ALL we have is what we observe through our telescopes and spacecraft.  We HAVE to recreate those things through informed visualizations because we can’t go there and experience them for ourselves.  They may be scenes on Mars or flybys of exoplanets or trips to the limits of the observable universe, but they’re based on data — on information we KNOW.  This is the essence of visual storytelling that any of us who write and produce know in our bones.

The science data we gather helps form our perceptions of the reality of those objects and events in space. Using visualizations to help us understand those things until we DO get there is not “faking it”.  It’s a part of science, as real as the observation process that brings us the data in the first place, the CAT scans that bring data to doctors, and so on. It’s as real as it’s going to get. And, data in the form of visualizations is what we deal with in the dome: recreating imagery of the universe that astronomers are discovering, charting, and explaining on our behalf.