16 December 25
Location
Online (Zoom)
Kim Albrecht: “Data Visualization as Abstract Realism”
This talk explores the epistemic and aesthetic dimensions of data visualization, examining how abstraction shapes our perception of reality. Drawing on theoretical perspectives and a range of artistic and research-based projects, I will interrogate how data visualization constructs, distorts, and challenges the relationship between abstraction and reality. By critically engaging with its visual grammar and ideological underpinnings, this talk will reflect on the tensions inherent in making the invisible visible through abstraction.
Kim Albrecht conducts research at the intersection of data visualization, technology, and culture. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design, a Master of Arts in Interface Design, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Media Theory. He is a principal at metaLAB at Harvard and Berlin, a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and a professor of information design at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany. He is known for his exploration of the aesthetic properties of data, and his work spans teaching, research, and application.
Participation via Zoom link
Part of the International Lecture Series
Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary
From automated navigation to weather forecasts, data visualizations, and painting, abstraction has an undeniable presence in the contemporary world. Yet, it not only represents but also creates worlds. It is an operative concept that likewise possesses an imaginary thrust for perceiving things otherwise. As such, abstraction comes in many different forms: It is an aesthetic, a technology, an epistemology, and a practice. Therefore, it is also a political attitude, a mode of description, a tool of complexity reduction, and an instruction for intervention. Depending on its context and use, it can take on radically different connotations, ranging from dehumanizing to appealing, from affirmative to critical, from incorporated to autonomous.
Taking its cue from the different meanings and applications of abstraction, the international lecture series “Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary” is designed as an interdisciplinary endeavor with a focus on visual media and digital culture. Most digital technologies (like networks, computer simulation or artificial intelligence) and correlated practices are closely connected to different forms of abstraction on different levels. To do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, the series brings together a group of international scholars, artists, and curators who speak on abstraction today as it unfolds in fields such as art, photography, film, design, image science, visual culture studies, philosophy, and more. Grounding the inquiries into the contemporary conditions of abstraction are contributions focusing on its historical lineage, most importantly its emergence within the discourse of modernism to be understood in its global and postcolonial plurality.
January 13, 2026
Birgit Schneider (Media Studies, University of Potsdam): “Making Climate Data Graspable through Visualization and Sonification in Art and Science”
January 20, 2026
Alberto Toscano (Sociology, Goldsmiths London): “A Practice of Abstraction: Race in the Field of Vision”
January 27, 2026:
Crystal Z. Campbell (Art, University of Buffalo): “Abstraction, Pareidolia, and the Underloved”
For any updates see https://www.medienwissenschaft.uni-bonn.de/lehrveranstaltungen/abstraction-today-1
Organized by Svea Braeunert (Media Studies, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam & University of Bonn), Birgit Mersmann (Art History, University of Bonn), Jens Schröter (Media Studies, University of Bonn).
With the support of the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (ZeM), the Gielen-Leyendecker-Foundation, and Studium Universale at University of Bonn.
