“[…]Data, reduced to their purest form of mathematical values, exist first and fo remost as number, and, as number, data’s primary mode o f existence is not a visual one. Thus to say “no necessary” means that any visualization of data requires a contingent leap from the mode of the mathematical to the mode of the visual. This does not mean that aestheticization cannot be achieved. And it does not mean that such acts of aestheticization are unmotivated, nugatory, arbitrary, or otherwise unimportant. It simply means that any visualization of data must invent an artificial set of translation rules that convert abstract number to semiotic sign. Hence it is not too juvenile to point out that any data visualization is first and foremost a visualization of the conversion rules themselves, and only secondarily a visualization of the raw data. Visualization wears its own artifice on its sleeve. And because of this, any data visualization will be first and foremost a theater for the logic of necessity that has been superimposed on the vast sea of contingent relations. So with the word “form ” already present in the predicate of the first thesis, and if the reader will allow a sloppy syllogism, it is possible to re jigger the first thesis so that both data and information may be united in something of an algebraic relationship . Hence now it goes, data have no necessary information” (A.R. Galloway, The Interface Effect. Polity, 2013, 83)
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