This summer I had the honor of speaking at DATA | ART, an event at MIT and sponsored by MetaLab at Harvard and Northeastern University, that gathers practitioners who live in the liminal space between “what is data” and “what becomes art.” The conversation often revolves around the tension between precision and poetry, between representation and revelation, between truth and . What follows are some thoughts sparked by my presentation, both what I tried to communicate and what I’ve been carrying with me since.
Data’s Hidden Rhythms
Beneath and in and around what sometimes looks like noise are rhythms, patterns, histories that pull us in. The job of the map-maker, the data artist, the designer is in part to excavate those hidden architectures, in part to call attention to how the data was created.
Data isn’t just informational! It lives in space and time. It has arcs, recursions, flares. Good design doesn’t flatten this energy. It amplifies it. As an example: in the image below from American Panorama, Chinese people make up a significant part of the foreign born population of San Francisco according to the 1900 census. Step forward to 1910, and they disappear until the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Sometimes there’s a gap in your data, sometimes there’s a problem with your code, and sometimes the gap illustrates a provision in the Chinese Exclusion Act that forbade non-white foreign born people from being counted in the US census.
Design as Translation
Design is never neutral. Every color, every projection, every label is a decision point. Maps and data visualizations don’t just describe the world; they interpret it, they express a point of view.
To be mindful of those decisions is to be accountable. Translation from raw data to visual and interactive artifact is at its core political, aesthetic, ethical.
Seeing the System: Data Visualization as Critical Practice, a piece I co-wrote with Emily Pugh for the Getty’s Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles, goes into this by calling attention to Ed Ruscha’s archive and how the very very deadpan nature of his practice belies a specific process of making photographs that has its own agenda.
Scale, Aggregation, and Voice
At coarse scales, big stories take shape. At fine scales, counter-narratives emerge. Good design gives audiences the ability to toggle between the two.
Aggregating data can clarify, but it can also silence. The craft lies in balancing the macro and the micro.
The Poetics of Imperfection
Data is incomplete. Maps distort. Projections lie. Sometimes the most honest work shows the mess.
When we leave room for ambiguity or error, the work becomes less of a lecture, and more of a conversation.
What Data-Art Requires
Doing good work in this space requires curiosity, humility, rigor, and wonder.
- Curiosity to pursue odd datasets, unexpected formats, untold stories.
- Humility to admit what you don’t know.
- Rigor in the craft of scales, sources, and design.
- Wonder because often the most powerful images are those that surprise you!
Approach data as a living thing. Let it surprise you. Let it resist tidy narratives. And when you make something — a map, a chart, an installation — aim to hold space for the ineffable, for the not-quite-known.
Thanks to everyone at DATA | ART for a brilliant day of seeing, listening, imagining. More soon!