Watz' visualization for Knight Capital Group depicting intraday buy and sell order data.

Data visualization is nothing less than real-time commentary on the human condition. But it's ambition to make intelligible the dizzying amount of data that we generate daily is as much a sociological experiment, rooted in computer science, as it is a legitimate art form.

Like all art forms, one mode of expression isn't enough. For every data visualist that aims to bring instant clarity to a complex world, there are others whose aim is to obfuscate it further. The value being that a dense aesthetic makes for a more subjective experience.

One such artist is Berlin-based Marius Watz. Like a true abstractionist, Watz shuns naturalistic representation in favor of bold, geometric generative designs that aren't directly linked to the data. Instead, he's concerned with presenting an aesthetic view of the spaces that the data presents.

"The process is always shaped by the knowledge of what the data is," explains Watz. "But I generally try to find patterns that are latent in the data or to find some characteristic that is already there and pursue that."

A data visualization for Knight Capital Group showing intraday buy and sell order data.

Without a clear-cut semantic relationship between data and form, Watz' work can enter more freely in different spaces, including advertising.

Last year, he completed a campaign for stock trading company Knight Capital Group via Deremus, a New York-based agency specializing in business communications. The campaign consisted of a series of visualizations based on stock trading data, which were used for a print as well as broadcast spots.

"When I was researching the project, I realized that I was up against a huge amount of data and the understanding of how complex the world of electronic trading is," he says. "I wanted to present the complexities of that - the fact that there are literally thousands of stocks involved, generating microseconds of data everyday. My response was to plot stock prices as three dimensional structures that make up the landscape, or datascape if you will."

Not entirely convinced that the financial world would connect the visualizations to their experience, Watz was initially hesitant to work on the campaign.

A visualization depicting historical stock price data.

"I really tried to understand their world," he explains. "It was exciting because when I presented it to them, their response was, ‘This is nothing like we ever imagined.' But it actually works: it came across as something that for them was an interesting way of seeing what they're dealing with everyday."

While Watz' abstract approach may differ from other data visualists, the goal among them remains the same: the ability to capture an overarching view of what we're "dealing with everyday" is the increasingly crucial approach in our always-on digital culture.

"We're used to navigating the world through mediated information streams: we walk around with our iPhones and we're connected to these huge amounts of data 24/7," says Watz. "That world feels natural to us but just 10n years ago it would have been unthinkable to have all that information at your fingertips all the time. In the '90s there was a big discussion in philosophy about the cyborg: the technically-augmented human and that was presented as a threatening figure. But today we've embraced a lot of those principles, except we're not embedding technology in the body, we're augmenting it by mobile phones, computers and netbook devices. What it translates to is that we've taken all these data sources and made them available to us. My experience of that is that it changes how you see the world."

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