Artist45: Stefanie Posavec

 Stefanie Posavec has dissected and distilled the information contained in books and translated them to visual format. In her dontpaniconline article, she discusses how this change in format from textual to visual representations of the contents of the books was done in an effort to better understand the stories and perhaps yield some hidden insight into the patterns of data therein. Though she doesn't say so outright, it seems to me like she's also changing the format of the perception and not just the subject matter. The experience of reading a book is generally a very subjective experience in which the reader composes the environment and characters largely in their mind based on the contents of the book. But Posavec takes a very different approach in her art, in that she objectifies this otherwise very subjective experience, relying on data and numbers rather than feeling and personal context to create her images. Basically, she's changing format from a more subjective perception of the book to a more objective perception.

This is process I've been working with lately. The act of distilling and objectifying things otherwise very subjective in nature seems to consistently allow me to step back and see the bigger picture or at least see the same picture in different light. Either option tends to yield something valuable. Posavec's graph/data art is a strong example of this principle and process and one worth taking a closer look at.