Data Art
90 posts
Digital assistants offer convenience, but they also offer continuous surveillance, and it’s not always clear when the tech is listening. Alias by Bjørn Karmann is a device you put on top of the assistant the block any unwanted listening: Alias acts as a middle-man device that is designed to appropriate any voice activated device. Equipped with speakers and a microphone, Alias is able to communicate and manipulate the home assistant...
Michelle Chandra uses street data as a base for solvable mazes: I draw each maze map by hand using the real street data of cities. In keeping with the fun nature of my art, I choose iconic city landmarks for the start and end of each maze – landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge, Coney Island, or the Santa Monica Pier. All my maze maps are tested with friends and...
The Earth Puzzle by generative design studio Nervous System has no defined borders. You put it together how you want. Start anywhere and see where your journey takes you. This puzzle is based on an icosahedral map projection and has the topology of a sphere. This means it has no edges, no North and South, and no fixed shape. Try to get the landmasses together or see how the oceans...
Shirley Wu used a tree metaphor to represent the interactions of five individuals with an SFMOMA texting service: Last June, SFMOMA launched Send Me SFMOMA, a service where individuals could text a variety of requests – “send me love”, “send me hope”, “send me smiles” – and SFMOMA would respond with an artwork that best matched the request. They received over 5 million texts from hundreds of thousands of individuals...
Accurat, in partnership with the Google News Initiative, built an augmented reality app to build statues of hope: We live in a world awash with information. Every time we walk the street holding our phones, every time we perform a research online or buy a product with our credit card data is created and often time communicated to us. How can we make people care about a specific dataset? How...
Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec continue on their path of Dear Data with a book that you draw in: Observe, Collect, Draw! The first section describes some of the basics of journaling with data and how you can use various visual encodings. However, the main part of the book is a journal that guides you through collection and the visual encodings that Lupi and Posavec used with their postcards. First,...
Craig Taylor from Ito World used a coral metaphor to visualize road networks in major cities around the world: For the past six months I have been fascinated by the concept of making city networks look like living corals. The varying patterns of urban forms are inherently dictated by their road network; a complex, seemingly organic connection of links moving people across their city. Like branches of coral they have...
Morph, by Datavized in collaboration with Google News, is a tool to generate abstract images from data: Morph exists to engage users in the creative expression of data without having to code. Generative art based algorithms turn data into a visual representation and the user can affect how their data interacts with the final visual via the algorithm. The algorithms themselves are not fixed; the user can randomly mutate, evolve...
Brian House collected polluted water with acid mine drainage in the Tshimologong Precinct, Johannesburg and translated pollution levels to sound: Acid Love comprises vessels of AMD gathered from a mine on the outskirts of the city. These are connected in an electrical circuit that measures the conductivity from the metals of the water and coverts it into sound. The sound is further modulated by data gathered from remediation efforts at...
Tom White is an artist who uses neural networks to draw abstract pictures of objects. What looks blobby and fuzzy to us looks more concrete to the machine. James Vincent for The Verge: That “voice” is actually a series of algorithms that White has dubbed his “Perception Engines.” They take the data that machine vision algorithms are trained on — databases of thousands of pictures of objects — and distill...