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DATA ART: the rise of the data artist

a new breed of artists are taking over the fine art space. their paintbrush? millions and millions of data points

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When I Was Young….

I used to want to be a lot of things, but most notably, I used to want to be a fine artist.
so much so that when I graduated from University, I didn’t even take the time to look for a job but instead chose to take my small savings and open an art gallery in the middle of Washington, D.C. (a bold move that proved to be quite costly! but I’ll never forget the experience)

fine art and technology often times seem to be polar opposites, and though design is one creative process that plays a huge part in the development of technology products, the two domains have kept a healthy distance from the other for good reasons.

surprisingly, over the last decade, a new breed of fine artist has been brewing: remarkably intelligent technologists who “paint” their canvases using the visualizations of millions of data points.






Data As A Paintbrush.

advancements in data aggregation and distribution systems have enabled engineers to store and monitor more data than ever before.

Using data visualization software like Seaborn, Bokeh… these Data Artists are able to create beautiful and often interactive visualizations that carry a load of information and substance. Visualizations are often presented on next generation multi-media screens that allow a single data point to be represented down to the pixel. (we are talking billions of pixels in resolution)



Data Bloom.

Data Bloom was an interactive live art exhibition held at Money2020 in Amsterdam June of 2018 by global advertising giant Publicis Sapient. The exhibition featured the best of Data Art and gave viewers a glimpse of the future of this new kind of fine art and its endless possibilities. Check out the video below and dive into some data!








A True Measure Of The Times We Live In.

Art should represent its time: if you were a Fine Art curator or dealer, or you just so happened to manage a museum, the relevance of the art you appreciate to its time of creation is a key deciding factor in exhibition as well as a great measure of a piece’s monetary value.
The technological boom of the 90’s, followed by the digital and social explosions of the last 2 decades have set the stage for a time when technology very easily plays the biggest part in our lives. There is no greater representation of the times we are in than art that brilliantly employs that technology

Not Your GrandMa’s Art.

Thanks to social media, the rise of IOT, and new systems of storing data, humans have created more data in the last 2 years than over the entire previous human existence ! Let that sink in… Using data storage and aggregation tools like Hadoop & MaReduce, even Live Event Data procession tools like Apache Kafka & Flume.. these artists are able to create art that captures data in real time, adjusting to changing conditions. Interactive art pieces have also been part of these new age exhibitions












Well, How Much Does It Really Matter?


There’s got to be a happy medium, I think, between plain old data charts and numbers that give a user what he or she needs or wants to know, and data art. I think data can indeed just be visualized as art pieces, but the proposition with this sort of thing is that it is delivering insights.
If someone whipped up a visual that shows my connected life like this, my cascade of reactions would be, “Oh Wow! that’s cool.” Followed by “That’s really nice.” And wrapping up with “Ok, ummm, thanks.”