Circle Tales. Infographics to Tell About Contemporary Art

Geometrical depiction, originally conceived as a series of decorative, symbolic, self-referential, and eschatological shapes, became intertwined with statistical science in the eighteenth century. In the modern era, it has related to new informational theories, thereby giving rise to the contemporary infographic: a tool to analyse and present data based on graphs, maps, and diagrams. The visualization of data encompasses the geometrical abstraction of the discrete world and the numbering of its parts; there is a whole series of models (histograms, diagrams, dendrograms, etc.) whose representational effectiveness and final visual harmony are possible only applying specific creative knowledge. The circle, in its capability to be divided into infinite portions (rings, sectors, and segments), is one of the most used model: it allows for a very rich variety of applications to compare data. After a basic introduction on the discipline of Information design, the paper presents a teaching experience in which graphical design is applied to a project to visualize contemporary art: the series of installations in the exhibit space of a private institution in Rome. The students created original infographics containing point-like information relating the 76 shows and they often chose circle images to organize the numerous data. Keywords: Visual data, Contemporary art, Digital humanities