Visualisation of Cyberspace in Neuromancer was my Final Major Project from my Graphic Design MA course in 2021.
As the technique of brain-computer interface develops and human civilisation moves towards the future when brains can directly access the Internet, I believe that graphic design will expand its landscape when ‘visible’ brain-computer interfaces can be widely applied. This data visualisation project is both a prophecy and a tribute to the iconic science fiction novel Neuromancer (Gibson,1984) which coined the term ‘cyberspace’.
The video intends to predict a user-centred experience in cyberspace, which was envisioned in Neuromancer, but within today’s context. The most significant visual element ‘light reflection in a rod’ came from the optical fibre cables, which represent the materiality of today’s Internet. On the other hand, the quantitative contents ‘packets’ and ‘hops’ indicate the real structure of Internet. The distance in cyberspace is redefined as ‘delay time’ between two IP addresses.
In addition, an imitation of ‘phosphene’ phenomenon is based on both a study of cognitive neuroscience of vision and the description of cyberspace in Neuromancer: ‘…in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space’(Gibson, 1984). The original data set were collected by the author using ‘traceroute’ command under MacOS system from 20 most popular websites in April 2021 according to a report from Statista.
My explorations split into two different paths, which can be perfectly represented by two static outcome figures: the one above is data graphic which means a pure quantitative expression of the data set guided by the ‘theory of data graphics’ in The visual display of quantitative information (Tufte, 2001); the one on the top can be regarded as ‘dataesthetic’, a term used in Data Flow 2 (Klaten, 2010) for all the data visualisation works that are ‘not to inform’, but to use data as materials for data art. These two paths converged in the final video, opening a wider discussion with other practitioners sharing the same interest.
