visap’22: mingling spaces

The theme for VISAP’22 is “mingling spaces”. For 10 years the VIS Arts Program, and before this the VIS Arts Show, have represented a mingling space, a space “to bring or mix together or with something else, usually without fundamental loss of identity” [Merriam-Webster]. VISAP is a mingling space where those who actively work at the intersection of visualization, the arts and design and those who appreciate and/or are inspired by the results of these works can meet, discuss, and exchange perspectives. However, across all these years, the meaning of “space” in the context of the conference has constantly changed and evolved and with it the form of mingling. VISAP as a mingling space has seen many different themes, disciplines, methodologies, techniques, formats, people, and locations, with the two most recent VISAPs that took place virtually, maybe representing the most drastic change to the ways in which works were presented and discussed.

VISAP’22 will take place in a hybrid format, and we will therefore experiment with different forms of mingling, attempting to bridge and mix not only disciplines, methodologies and techniques but also the virtual and the physical, the immaterial and the material; people and artifacts online and offline, remote and on-site.

In line with this experiment, we invite submissions that explore, re-interpret, speculate and reflect on the idea of mingling spaces. How have the ways in which we mingle changed in response to technological, social, political, and economic factors (e.g., digitization, the rise of social media, the pandemic, the climate crisis, the renaissance of nationalism and right-wing populism, etc…)? And how has this changed the concept of space? How has our behaviour, our communication, and the ways in which we read and experience each other changed in response to the digital and physical spaces in which we mingle? How does personal data and their representation facilitate, change, distort, feed off and/or inhibit the mingling of people, ideas, and spaces? And how can mingling spaces bridge physical, disciplinary, conceptual and ideological boundaries?