Abstraction versus Realism: Not the Real Question

Abstract

When browsing through a book on computer graphics, one usually finds a lot of more or less interesting pictures that are produced by means of computers. These pictures are embedded in pages of technical texts describing how this image generation was performed and why it provides a better way to do so than other methods. Less space is usually given to the methodological background and the motivation underlying the preoccupation with computer visualization. In this chapter, we want to complement the more technically oriented part of this book with some reflections as to why such techniques can be interesting not only for computer graphics researchers, and where, from a communication-theoretic point of view, they might be of use in our society.