Lisa Jevbratt: "1:1"

Martin Wattenberg: Shape of Song

Databases, seismic data, Computed Axial Tomography scans, Mozart’s symphonies, the first 1000 prime numbers: All these are large data sets containing patterns hidden from view unless presented in a human-readable form. With the increasing power of personal computers it is now becoming possible to visualize data sets that previously would have been inaccessable to anyone but researchers with access to old-school supercomputers. As a result, information visualization has become a fruitful new field of aesthetic exploration.

The theorist Lev Manovich posits that mapping one data set into another is one of the principal operations of computing. He argues that art projects like Carnivore and Lisa Jevbratt's "1:1" produce profound emotional responses despite their being essentially data visualizations. Where the Romantic artists were concerned with the sublime and the un-representable, data art is concerned with making representations of phenomena previously invisible.

On the more pragmatic side of things, designers are employing computational techniques to escape traditional 2-dimensional representations. The results are dynamic software visualizations of complex data like genome structures, version history in documents with multiple authors or power structures in American corporations.

Information visualization theory references:

Some projects & people: