VISAP’18 Call for Entries

The program

The VIS Arts Program (VISAP) is a forum where visualization researchers, designers, and media artists come together to discuss topics in data visualization around an annual theme, intended to be relevant to art, design, and academic research communities. It is the biggest associated event in the IEEE VIS conference, and its main goal is to foster new thinking, discussion, and collaboration between fields.

VISAP welcomes a wide range of submissions, including interactive artworks, design projects, novel visualization tools and applications, art-science or artist-in-lab projects, evaluations of data visualizations, and philosophical meditations on the intersections between art and research. These can either be submitted to a paper track, or to an exhibition track (read details below). Accepted works will be published on the official VISAP website and in a dedicated exhibition catalogue, and will be indexed in the IEEE Xplore digital library.

The theme

The theme for VISAP’18 is data and identities. We invite submissions that reflect on how data collected through our everyday use of digital devices and services shape our online and offline identities, as well as how they may affect our social interactions.

Identity generally deals with the question: who am I?, as we navigate through various environments and communities using a plurality of masks, or persona. These masks are mostly static representations of ourselves, which we apply to broad situations; they are self-declared, curated descriptions of personal attributes we chose to share at a specific point in time. They can be more or less detailed, and more or less accurate. We can manage and act them out to serve specific purposes.

Meanwhile, our daily use of connected devices enables us to keep track of almost everything we say and do, and the resulting digital archives of our discussions, photos, videos, the number steps we take, our sleep patterns, etc., can be used to paint a more holistic, detailed, and dynamic picture of who we are, beyond what we might like to claim, or set ourselves up to be. This can have a positive impact on personal, self-reflective practices, but it can also hinder our interactions with others if made public, it questions our individuality, and in some cases, it can pose a threat to our fundamental human right to privacy.

VISAP’18 proposes to be a space for exploring these complex dynamics between the collection and presentation of personal data, their link to our identities and how we portray ourselves (both introspectively and to others), and for questioning whether the answer to who am I? can truly be found in observable, exterior, objective measures.

Submission details

Submissions can either be made to a paper track, as an extended abstract with a 10 page limit, including references; to an exhibition track, as a 2 page description of the exhibit, accompanied by any relevant visuals and/or sound files, or as an annotated portfolio with a 16 page limit. All submissions are due by June 8, 2018, and will be made using the Precision Conference System (PCS).

Read the Submission Instructions for details.

Note that we strongly encourage annotated portfolio submissions this year, as the format seems most appropriate for VISAP. We also encourage submissions to focus on the relationships between the design process and the final artifact. Artists, designers, and researchers all make creative choices based on practical knowledge, generally acquired through experience. Unfortunately, this knowledge is seldom shared in publications. VISAP aims to foster discussions around this reflection-in-action when creating visualizations or data-driven art pieces.

Accepted submissions to the paper track will be presented during one of two paper sessions, while accepted exhibits and annotated portfolios will be displayed during an opening reception, and throughout the conference in a specially allocated exhibition space.

We look forward to your participation!

Jeremy Boy and Till Nagel
VISAP’18 General Chairs