Mapping an Online Cosmology

Information wants to be space. From flowcharts to data maps to those yahoo graphs in USA Today, spatial imagery incarnates abstraction into three dimensions. But however rigorous this mapping is, an imaginative residue always remains -- population charts using human figures become a cop line-up of dwarfs and giants, while nonrepresentational scientific charts take us into Mondrian. There is a peculiar pleasure to art that we know is also information, a pleasure at once visual and abstract. Think about the...