The Fun, Beauty, and Power of Data-driven Art

Data-driven art has arrived!  Everything generates data, we collect it relentlessly, and we’ve learned how to make art from it:  to go from simple numbers to artistic creations of all sorts – visual art, sculpture, music, literature, environmental art.  

The idea sounds new, but the first few examples of art from data are over a century old.  Now, we see data-driven art everywhere and daily.  The dawn of computerization and then Internet-based “big data” fed this growth.  But more importantly, people increasingly recognize the fun, beauty, and power of presenting data in an artistic form.  They want their numbers to shout, their findings to command attention, in a more appealing and compelling way than dry B&W line graphs and bar charts.  

This presentation shows and describes example data-driven artworks of some of the many individuals and organizations prominent in this genre.  Creations include color- and sound-coded representation of refugee migrations, a sculpture of the sonic signature of a musical piece, a musical piece created from weather event data, stunningly beautiful illustrations of complex networks, temperature blankets, and the work of a virtual artist.  

This presentation was first given virtually to a community-based science interest group in March 2022.  The presentation will serve as the introductory foundation of a graduate course on data visualization.  

We hope this inspires you to think about data sources in your world in a new way, be they personal activities/interests, family events, athletic performances, organizational achievements, business goals, historical timelines … whatever!  What are the key variables of greatest interest?  What message do the data convey?  And then, how best to turn those numbers into art?