George Legrady Professor of Interactive Media at the University of California, Santa Barbara holds a joint appointment in the Media Arts & Technology graduate program and the department of Art.

  Research Focus My current research addresses data collection, data processing methodologies and data visualization presented simultaneously in interactive installations and the internet. The projects make use of self-organizing systems and algorithmically generated visualizations.

I have integrated digital processes into my artistic work since the mid-1980's, investigating 2 different directions: methodologies to address the organization of cultural data, and new forms of visualization coming out of algorithmic processes.


  Current Projects

There are currently 3 projects active:

“Pockets Full of Memories” consists of the public contributing data (an image of an object and semantic descriptors) to a database whose data is visually organized by the Kohonen self-organizing mapping algorithm in a 2Dimensionl map. The algorithm basically looks at all the data and continuously organizes them in a 2D space so that every object is surrounded by others of similar semantic attributes until order is achieved at the local and global state.

The exhibition has been presented in Paris, Rotterdam, Linz, Budapest, Helsinki, and Manchester between 2001-2005. The accumulation of collected data at these exhibitions has become a subject of study in itself. We are currently analyzing what kinds of data has been collected and how everyday objects such as cellphones, notebooks, keys, etc. differ in their cultural descriptions at each of the venues and how these differences can best be expressed visually.

“Making Visible the Invisible” is a commission for the new prestigious Seattle Public Library, by the internationally renown architect Rem Koolhaas. The project consists of analyzing and then visually mapping on a daily basis changes in what the public is reading, tracked through the circulation of books going in and out of the library. These are to be presented on 6 horizontally positioned plasma screens in the main “Mixing Chamber” research room.

“Global Collaborative Visual Mapping Archive” (GCVMA) focuses on cellphone transmission visualized as a dynamically changing 3D architectural structure. Research addresses methods of wireless cellular technological telecommunications devices, methods of data assembly such as self-organizing, neural-net, networks models, swarm intelligence algorithms, and the visual interface by which the images and their data are to be accessed and interacted with.


  Analog to Digital Prior to my involvement with computer based research begun in the early 1980’s, I was involved with formal, conceptual, and theoretical models to examine the conventions of another technological representational medium: the photographic image. The semantics of photographic representation and the production of cultural and syntactic meaning generated through the photograph’s mechanical and technological visualization were the key topics of these investigations. These include archaeological or archive classification, sampling and fragmenting of information, recontextualizing found materials, strategies of linguistic and semiotic structuring, the analysis of cultural narrative construction and other modes of information management that have entered art practice through the conceptual art movement of the 1960’s. Artistic methods of that era that have served as references for my current work include archive classification work, algorithmic based instructions, some conceptual artists' conditional propositions and narrative systems, and the socio-political investigations of artworks that engage in critical discourse.