From the course: Data Visualization: A Lesson and Listen Series

Lesson: Data art

(bouncy music) - Data can be cold, quantitative, emotionless, lacking meaning, dare I say, devoid of humanity. On the other hand, art is different. It's almost the opposite of those things, but only if you choose to look at it that way. What are the most precious things you have? Is it possessions, assets, money? For me, it's my daughter. But if you break it down, really, she's just data. She's made of a few billion base pairs of DNA, numerous cells, atoms, et cetera, all of which is pure data. So, here's the question. If everything is data in the end, and we make art to express our most precious thoughts, ideas, and emotions, among other things, why can't we make art from data? But how, and how many ways can we do so? I can't possibly provide a complete list because art is boundless, data is boundless, so data art is by definition boundless too. But here are a few types of data art that are worth your consideration. There's the purely visual art that traditional data visualization can create, whether by intention or by accident. We can create beautiful patterns simply by visualizing datasets using traditional methods. Sometimes these are accidental, such as when a developer introduces a bug into the code that might generate surprising patterns. I'd say even some of the prettier screensavers from the mid to late nineties are data art. Another type of data art is when we make commentary using data as the medium. One example of this is the project "Depth to Water" created by Julia Krolik and Owen Fernley, which provides a commentary on groundwater as one continuous subterranean resource that's shared and accessed above ground by a community whose shape and presence is revealed by those connections to the water source below. I'll be talking to one of the creators of this project in the interview later. Data art can also be the transformation of a very standard data display such as a stock chart into both a visually beautiful rendition of itself including additional visual context, while simultaneously providing commentary or insight on the data as in this chart depicting the simultaneous rise of Amazon stock and the fall of Macy's and JCPenney stocks. But why do data art? What's the point? Aren't data visualization and data storytelling always meant to educate, explain, convince, or drive decision making? Well, isn't the point of art often to do many of those same things? In my opinion, art is meant to evoke emotion, trigger a visceral response, get people thinking about their lives, their society, their world in new and interesting ways. Art can do this in the form of a poem about red wheelbarrows, a song about redemption, a painting of a religious allegory, or yes, a digital visualization of a dataset about an important, controversial, or emotional topic of the day. Next I'll be speaking with Julia Krolik, an information designer, data scientist, artist and entrepreneur. Stay tuned.

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