Data Art
118 posts
North Drinkware molded Half Dome in the bottom of a hand-blown pint glass using elevation data from the United States Geological Survey. Wow. [via @blprnt] Tags: elevation, glass, Half Dome, North Drinkware
Reddit user WhiteCheeks used dot density to show population counts of various animals. Each dot represents an animal. So animals with lower counts show less obviously. This is similar to the use of pixelation to show endangered species, which I think works better since the size of the dots above don’t encode anything. Tags: animals, extinction
After seeing stoxart, I was reminded of Michael Najjar’s project High Altitude from 2010-ish. He used photos he captured while climbing Mount Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas, as the backdrop for stock data: The series visualizes the development of the leading global stock market indices over the past 20-30 years. The virtual data mountains of the stock market charts are resublimated in the craggy materiality of the Argentinean...
stoxart is a project by Gladys where she turns stock market chart to landscape illustrations. The peaks become mountains, the dips become a space for the moon and the stars. The above is an illustration for Purple, which specializes in mattresses, and its base chart which forms the landscape. Here’s another for Ford, with an apt illustration of a Ford truck riding the terrain: Grab a print here (or request...
Slime mold are single-celled organisms that can work together to form multicellular structures. Antonio Sánchez Chinchón used slime mold simulations generate these images: This post talks about a generative system called Physarum model, which simulates the evolution of a colony of extremely simple organisms that, under certain environmental conditions, result into complex behaviors. Apart from the scientific interest of the topic, this model produce impressive images like this one, that...
A million dollars. A billion dollars. The latter is 1,000 times more than the former. Just add a few zeros, right? Tom Scott used a road trip to visualize the actual difference in scale. Scott starts by setting the baseline of a million dollars with a short, one-minute walk. Stack one million dollar bills after the other and it’s about the length of a football field. Stack one billion, and...
As a 100-day project, Alli Torban has been imagining what a data visualization designer’s wallpaper might look like through the years. She started in 1920, and with one design per year, she’s up to 1989. The focus on aesthetics shows slow shifts in colors and patterns through time. Although I feel like the early 1980s, when The Visual Display of Quantitative Information was first published, should look super minimalist with...
Robert Hodgin built a procedural system he calls Meander to generate the beauty above, among several others: My all-time favorite map-based data visualization was created in 1944. Harold Fisk, working with the US Army Corp. of Engineers, mapped the length of the Mississippi River. What sets his visualization apart from others is that he maps the river through time, and manages to do so in a way that is both...
Ed Hawkins, who you might recognize from charts such as spiraling global temperature and the aforementioned temperature grid, encourages you to show your stripes. Select your region, and see how average temperature increased. I saw this last year, but I just realized that people are using this chart to print, knit, and decorate. Emmalie Dropkin made a blanket: Pueblo Vida Brewing and the University of Arizona Climate Systems Center used...
Based on a chart by Ed Hawkins, the shower wall of Gretchen Goldman and Tom Di Liberto transformed into a canvas to show global warming. Each row represents a country, and each cell — I mean tile — represents the temperature difference compared to the overall average for the time period. Tags: climate, global warming, physical, shower