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International interest in the sophisticated and aesthetic visualization of complex information made Data Flow a bestseller. Today, more and more graphic designers, advertising agencies, motion designers, and artists work in this area. New techniques and forms of expression are being developed. Consequently, the demand for information on this topic has grown enormously.

Data Flow 2 expands the definition of contemporary information graphics. The book features new possibilities for diagrams, maps, and charts. It investigates the visual and intuitive presentation of processes, data, and information. Concrete examples of research and art projects as well as commercial work illuminate how techniques such as simplification, abstraction, metaphor, and dramatization function. The book also includes interviews with experts such as The New York Times’s Steve Duenes, Infosthetics’s Andrew Vande Moere, Visualcomplexity’s Manuel Lima, ART+COM’s Joachim Sauter, and passionate cartographer Menno-Jan Kraak as well as text features by Johannes Schardt about the challenges in creating effective information graphics and about the relationship between complexity, clarity, content, and innovation.

Offering practical advice, background information, case studies, and inspiration, Data Flow 2 is a valuable reference for anyone working with or interested in information graphics.

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Bruno Novelli, better known as 9li, is a Brazilian artist whose works are equally as extraordinary visually as they are in meaning. His current exhibition META, explores themes about spiritism, alchemy and metaphysics, as well as his own life experiences.

Bruno Novelli

Caroline McCurdy

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Bruno Novelli, better known as 9li, is a Brazilian artist whose works are equally as extraordinary visually as they are in meaning. His current exhibition META, explores themes about spiritism, alchemy and metaphysics, as well as his own life experiences.

Growing Up
Bruno Novelli spent his childhood in Porto Alegre, in a neighborhood called Navegantes. He describes is as ‘that kind of neighborhood filled by big company’s sheds, a kind of industrial district. During the week it was pretty busy, but on weekends it was pretty calm, almost empty.’
Growing up in a place lacking in visual stimulation, Bruno created his own landscape.
‘I had to use my imagination a lot to create my own world. I used to find industrial garbage and have fun with that, it was a mix of natural and industrial influences. I remember I used to hear a singular bird singing at the morning mixed with sounds of big machines. It’s a huge contrast.’ This contrast is something which can been seen in his works today, where the natural and industrial elements move alongside one another. The contrasting themes are constructed harmoniously in some works, while others display a lot more energy, shown through the combination of the figures’ poses and intensity in the amount of detail.

At 17 years of age, Bruno decided to take on drawing as ‘a path for my life on earth’. He dropped out of design school as he felt it was a place ‘where I have to repeat and not to learn. I just don’t feel good in a place where you have no space to manifest what you really believe’. Now, ten years later, he will finish his formal qualifications by the end of 2008, with visions to teach in the future.

'Intergalactic Bugio'. Acrylic and India ink on archival Arches paper, 27.5” x 20.5” ©Bruno 9Li, META exhibition, photos courtesy Anno Domini gallery

Outside Brazil
Only in the past few years has Bruno’s work reached a wider audience. In 2007 he made his debut with an exhibition in the US, which he recalls as ‘an amazing experience…It was like the first step out of Brazil’. From here his work has been shown in several other countries and also led to a tour of Japan supported by Planet Patrol (a UK project of music and arts). On this tour he visited Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka, doing ‘live painting’.

Technique
All of Bruno’s works are hand-generated. ‘My work is based on drawings on paper. Specially 100% cotton papers and good professional Indian Ink and acrylic paint.’
Bruno has created works on both small and large scale, from small canvases to murals on the sides of buildings around the world. He states that he has no real preference for what size his canvas will be.
‘The structure of my work starts to be developed on paper…so to do that on a big wall is basically a scale difference for me. Of course it’s completely different then making a drawing in my studio, but the idea is structured in the drawing. What happens in the street is that there are many different influences in the process, like the intensity of the city, all people, police…I wish I could paint more on the street, but I’ve been spending a lot of energy on exhibits in galleries.’

Bruno Novelli ©Bruno 9Li, META exhibition, photos courtesy Anno Domini gallery

Themes
The elements Bruno explores are equally as intricate and detailed as the way they are displayed visually. He explains, ‘I’ve studied many subjects that I believe make deep sense for me. Many old texts from different philosophers and illuminated people can give us the idea of unity. I believe that we are all part of an unthinkable structure of nature. We are all connected on earth. As Chico Xavier said before, “We are immortal spirits, sons of God – each one being an original world created by God”.’
Bruno’s work displays these deeply fueled philosophies in such a complex design that it can feel almost overwhelming to the viewer. However on closer inspection the beauty of how all the elements work together is realised through the shape and colour, the subjects and their surroundings, allowing one to enjoy becoming immersed in the work itself.
With such perplexing, metaphysical concepts involved in the inspiration of the works, Bruno explains, at the core the motivation is actually quite simple. ‘I could list many different things that inspire me, but in the end, what makes me keep going forward is the mystery around us all, what is beyond all routine’s things.’

Future
In 2009, Bruno will be exhibiting work in two solo exhibitions in Europe in Milan and Copenhagen. After experiencing quite a hectic time of exhibitions and attention this year, Bruno reveals that he would like to take things at a more relaxed pace for now.
‘I’m focusing on taking things more calm next year. To be silent in my studio, producing a lot but with no deadlines; I’ll focus on my work for collectors’ commissions instead of all my efforts for exhibits. Let’s see what comes in the future. I hope me and my friends will be healthy in body and spirit, always learning.’

Anno Domini gallery

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JIM LAMBIE (Scottish, born 1964)
ZOBOP
2006
Vinyl tape
Dimensions variable
Fund for the Twenty-First Century

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Anne Paterson

Russian-born artist, Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), used vibrant colour to stimulate emotions. He believed art had spiritual values. Paintings were compositions, alternative music for the senses. Henry Matisse (1869-1954), leader of The Fauves art movement (1904-1908), used non-representational colour and representational form to convey different sensations, for example: to express the sensual colors of surroundings.

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today at MOMA New York
Throughout art history, colour has often been used as a strong symbolic element by artists, driven by an inner necessity to express emotions. However, in the early twentieth century, art underwent momentous change – a move away from the perceived elitist avant-garde tradition. Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today is a fascinating exploration and manifestation of this change. Ann Temkin, Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MOMA), presents works by 44 contemporary artists (including six installations specifically created for the exhibition) who have helped to re-shape our perceptions about the traditional use of colour and form.

ELLSWORTH KELLY (American, born 1923)
Colors for a Large Wall
1951
Oil on canvas, sixty-four panels
7′ 10 1/2″ x 7′ 10 1/2″ (240 x 240 cm)
Gift of the artist

The Marcel Duchamp influence
This radical break with tradition can be said to have been initiated by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) whose painting, ‘Tu ‘m’ (1918) is the first work on the exhibition’s timeline. Duchamp was associated with the art movements of Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism. His revolutionary and confronting philosophy about creating art, his ‘ready-mades’, shocked the art world at the time. He demonstrated that art could be ‘ready-made’: found objects, custom-made or ‘off-the-shelf’, and that it could be merely arbitrary or random – created by chance, and not necessarily by design . The object ‘became’ art, because the artist ‘chose’ it. For example, Duchamp’s work ‘The Fountain’ (1917), was a manufactured urinal which he believed that when placed in an art exhibition space, would change the observer’s perception of it, and encourage interaction and thought. In MOMA’s Color Chart exhibition, Marcel Duchamp’s challenging painting ‘Tu ‘m’ (1981), demands our attention, and then our interaction – in French it translates as ‘You ……. me’. Duchamp purposefully left the verb out so that it could be supplied by the observer, who then becomes a participator.<

ANDY WARHOL (American, 1928-1987)
Green Marilyn
1962
Silkscreen on synthetic polymer paint on canvas
20 x 16″ (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Gift of William C. Seitz and Irma S.
Seitz, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art

Pop Art
This celebration of the ‘everyday’, of popular culture as art, was later to break new ground again as the Pop Art movement took off in America and around the world in the 1950s, and over the next two decades. After World War 2, the commercial colour (paint) chart was developed and the status of paint changed. Colour became ‘ready-made’. Color Chart explores the impact of standardized, mass-produced color on contemporary art . It showcases work from 44 artists highlighting their unique responses to popular culture, random selection and colour . It includes work from key figures of Pop Art such as Andy Warhol (1928-1987) ,Robert Rauschenberg (1925-), Ellsworth Kelly (1923-) and Gerhard Richter (1932-) alongside the work of younger artists such as Sherrie Levine (1947-), Jim Lambie (1964-) and Damien Hirst (1965-).If you can’t make it to New York, there is an online version of the Color Chart exhibition. In the style of the art works themselves, it is wonderfully colourful, it requests our interaction, and it invites our response.

FRANK STELLA (American, born 1936)
Gran Cairo
1962
Alkyd on canvas
85 1/4 x 85 1/4″ (216.5 x 216.5 cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase, with funds from the
friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today
An exhibition which explores the impact of Standardized, Mass-Produced Colour on Contemporary Art with works by 44 Contemporary Artists
March 2 – May 12, 2008
The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery
Museum of Modern Art, New York
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