wk4 10.14/10.16: Data, Information Arts, Information, Noise

[shashank86]

1. Wind Map:

Even though we have been looking at many versions of maps on the weather channel. I liked the colors chosen to represent the wind flow, which makes the live interactions subtle, but also denotes the idea that there are only a few layers of main representation among the natural elements. It made me feel how life or living things are, and how non-living things feel more natural. And they make one gaze at the landscapes with varying wind flow and feel the fact that there is so much happening and that act is bound in such a meaningful way. This is important because the idea of completion occurs a step before something achieves permanency. This can be observed in the above art, and it teaches such an important lesson.

The live data makes it extremely functional and useful at the same time.

The Wind Map caught my eye for its ease of interactive ability of the useful data, and

2. Million Dollar Blocks by Center for Spatial Research Main navigation

This is nothing but a fake claim, or it could be a mirroring of a lie.

This work is an example of unethical use of both the data and metadata to trigger a biased notion in the audience.

Although the research labs mention that the data represented is backed by the statement saying that "... analytical and graphical techniques within the research and teaching environment of the Spatial Information Design Lab, which can then be applied to real-life policy initiatives through work with the JFA Institute." The use case and its dimension are not explained either in the article or through the Art.

It more of looks like a biased representation made on how much money is looted and wasted in the name of incarcerating the culprits. The amount of money invested could have been used towards improving the area's infrastructure, education, health, and living experiences, which would have been much more useful. On top of that, expressing and defending the idea that investment in these areas has resulted in significant costs to other elements of our civic infrastructure, such as education, housing, health, and family, is another wrong and false representation made using the metadata. The

To continue, the artwork deals with such an important topic and uses sensitive data, yet it doesn't give justification for the numbers claimed, which also makes the artwork incomplete, and there is nothing impressive, beautiful, or even useful (if not damaging) about the

But one can always argue that the purpose of the art itself could be to make me realize how the governing body is selling lies in the name of making our society a better place.

3. The Secret Life of Numbers

Actual link - https://flong.com/archive/projects/slon/index.html

The Secret Life of Numbers is an interesting work made in establishing and understanding the already established connections, which makes us think, how did we make the interesting interconnections similar to the number system unknowingly? Or what is it trying to say? But I also felt the work could have been expanded more towards an interesting visualization rather than a practical display of numbers represented mostly through the bar graphs. The information visualization could have been interconnected with the one other eco-system that follow the same relation dynamics.
But I learnt a valuable lesson on how many layers one has to make before making the call.



In the three mentioned artworks, I found the similarity with how the connection between some materialistic, non-living but interactive elements mirrors the entire ecosystem that exists around them. Like how the flow, interaction, and existence of wind, numbers, and money mirror the living elements and their society, group, and interactions of humans, animals, and plants. This makes one wonder what is main reason to all this.

[hyuncho]

We live surrounded by countless streams of data, often without realizing it. At this very moment, weather observations, biometric readings from smartwatches, credit card transactions, and electricity consumption records are continuously being collected. Yet this endless procession of numbers remains meaningless if left uninterpreted, merely fragments stored in memory without context. People often consider working with data as a dry technical task, but the same dataset can be turned into a poem or a report. Ultimately, the meaning of data depends on the intention and perspective of the one who handles it. Until I encountered the following artists’ works, I was unsure how to distinguish between data visualization and data-based art. However, through my research, I came to develop my own understanding of their difference.

So, how does data visualization in science and industry differ from the approach of art?
Data art explores the poetic potential of data. It discovers patterns within massive datasets and reveals their underlying structures in sensory and critical ways. While it shares data science’s curiosity about uncovering hidden knowledge, it diverges by reflecting on the very act of processing data itself. This approach aligns with a method of data mining known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), which produces insights not by seeking predefined answers but by identifying anomalies, inconsistencies, and distortions within classification systems (Legrady, “Big Data: From Data to Metadata,” Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of New Media Art, 2024). Through this unpredictable process, artists expose the errors, imbalances, and biases embedded in systems, revealing the social realities and power structures hidden beneath the surface of numerical information.

For example, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Shadow Stalker (2018–2019) is an interactive installation in which visitors enter their email addresses and an algorithm generates their “digital shadow.” By visualizing the predictive process of data analysis, the work exposes algorithmic bias and the asymmetry of data power that pervades our society.


Hassan Elahi’s Tracking Transience (2003–present) documents every detail of the artist’s daily life—his movements, meals, and accommodations—after he was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list following 9/11. By voluntarily participating in the surveillance system, Elahi ironically neutralizes its authority.


Meanwhile, Laura Kurgan and collaborators’ Million Dollar Blocks (2004–) maps the home addresses of incarcerated individuals and the cost of their imprisonment onto GIS-based visualizations. The project reveals that certain city blocks consume over a million dollars annually in prison-related expenses, exposing how the penal system disproportionately drains resources from poor and minority communities. Through data, it visualizes structural violence and socio-economic inequality.


In this way, artistic uses of data go far beyond mere visualization or sonification. They aim to uncover the invisible systems behind information itself. Data art becomes an act of revealing. The artist intervenes within the flow of data to expose hidden mechanisms and open possibilities for audiences to perceive the realities concealed beneath numbers.

[lucianparisi]

What stands out across George’s article and the works I will discuss is the concept of identity emerging through data and noise.

[eCLOUD]

This project integrates several relevant concepts to our field. The data is sources by realtime natural phenomenon in the world. Weather patterns are seemingly both organized and sporadic. Even with noisy weather data, our minds become fixated on pattern formation, and can serve as a sort of Rorschach for our own emotional projections.


[Signal to Noise (Software 1)]

Casey Reas’ work deals with George’s concept of data as “raw material” for artistic practice. “Signal Noise” takes ordinary television signals, a pervasive medium in our culture, and distorts them unrecognizably. In this distorted state, the data appears as pure noise with emergent pattern behavior. Behaviors that emerge result in a shared identity across different source signals.



1:1

Lisa Jevbratt’s 1:1 created a long term data bass of the growth of website addresses on the internet. The work provides different algorithms for interfacing with the databases, changing the perceived patterns that emerge. The interfaces (Migration, Hierarchical, Every, Random, Excursion) visualize each algorithm in a unique way. These visualizations are a different means for exploring this muddled source of information than our traditional search engines or browser. Each interface has its own identify created by sifting through noise.