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Plasmatic Visualization: Visceral Attunement to Environmental Data
Summary
Researchers built an interactive art-and-tech display called "Plasmatic Mirror" that blends a live video of your own body with visual data about microplastics, making the invisible problem of plastic pollution feel personal and immediate rather than just abstract news. This isn't a health study itself, but a design experiment showing how seeing yourself "merged" with pollution data might help people emotionally connect with environmental health threats like microplastics — which matters because we're more likely to act on issues that feel real and close to us, not just ones we read about.
In this pictorial, we introduce the conceptual framework of “plasmatic visualization,” an interactive form of data visualization that incorporates the image of the observer to provoke critical reflection on how data, bodies, and environments are mutually constituted. Drawing on the concept of plasmaticness from cel animation theory, we extend environmental data visualization beyond stable, objective representations toward affective, mutable experiences. We present “Plasmatic Mirror,” a design prototype using a real-time video camera co-located with an architectural-scale display to illustrate the principles of plasmatic visualization and engage participants in a reality-bending encounter with data on microplastics in the news. Through this work, we articulate three defining aesthetic qualities of plasmatic visualization—shifting from representational to visceral experience; from separate to entangled forms of visualization; and from exploring to attuning to environmental data—to support HCI designers in creating interactive data visualizations that prompt audiences to reflect on their relationship to environmental issues.