The contemporary artists and designers in Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art at Art Center College of Design, each use different types of data as the basis for work that is both imaginative and informative. This exhibition is part of The Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide programming.
From the gallery-
Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art explores selected works by contemporary artist and designers responding to data’s impact on daily life. The exhibition premise rises from the dawn of Big Data in the early 1990s, which brought with it advancements in the field of data visualization: the practice of representing vast quantities of information to make it understandable and engaging to the public.
In its early forms, data visualization was most often used in map-making and creating statistical graphics, viewed largely as a tool to convey information in the sciences and support analytic reasoning. In recent years the field has become an influential force in contemporary culture, transforming visual literacy in the global cultural landscape.
Seeing the Unseeable considers data in the recent past and present, addressing issues related to data mining and invisible data, data humanism, and data’s relationship to our varied environments. Exploring a critical cultural moment in our relationship with the magnitudes of information that routinely bombard us, works in the exhibition draw attention to issues ranging from the vastness and capabilities of data technologies to the personal, social and humanitarian consequences of data collection and data systems.
Hyojung Seo, “Singapore Weather Data Drawing Series (Wind Direction, Tem-perature, Windspeed) 2022
About the video work by Hyojung Seo–
Singapore Weather Data Drawing Series reconsiders data visualization as it develops beyond mere representation to aestheticization. As the title of the work suggests, this series of data are drawings aimed to build a visual narrative beyond the original scope of the data itself. The weather data drawings generally represent information about Singapore’s weather patterns, while also standing as abstract digital artworks. This visual loosening of data into a series of patterns and movements presents weather statistics thorough a visual sensation rather than a more conventional data visualization design. The essential link is the descriptive title. While the work may abstract Singapore’s weather patterns, the movement and shapes designed by Seo also expand the meaning of the information as a kind of living, organic form.
About the above work by Linnéa Gabriella Spransy–
Described by Spransy as “procedural abstractions,” the paintings shown present an alternative to what may be considered data-driven art. While terms such as “data” and “generative art” are often used to describe digital-based imagery, the artist’s painting method lies at the heart of data and data visualization: number patterns. The Prime Mover paintings demonstrate the intimate working relationship between the artist and pure data. Spransy begins by constructing linear patterns using prime number sequences onto the prepared canvas. From this accumulated form, she then selects areas to pour paint over. After the paint dries, she initiates another pattern that grows around the existing intrusions. This push and pull of structure and chaos creates a field of balance and counterbalance, an ebb and flow between the artist, the numbers, and the seemingly shifting, multiple layers and dimensions of her paintings.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, “Lu, Jack and Carrie (from The Garden of Delights)”, 1998, Archival pigment prints
About the above work by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Storm Prototype: Cloud Prototype No. 2 and 4, 2006 (the hanging titanium sculptures in the first photo)-
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is recognized for a wide-ranging, multifaceted practice resulting in sculpture, large-scale instal-lations, photography, and video. Ranging in scale from modest to monumental, his works are the result of years of research and achieved working in collaboration with creatives, inventors, and technicians in a vast range of fields, from the physical and life sciences to earth sciences. Lu, Jack and Carrie (from The Garden of Delights) (1998) is comprised of three colorful digital prints: a series of abstractions based on images of DNA samples taken from imaging technologies utilized in genomic mapping and depicting “families” of friends selected in sequence. Storm Prototype: Cloud Prototype Nos. 2 and 4 2006) are hovering spectral forms manifested in three dimensions from the analysis and compilation of real weather data. Additionally, the works are inspired by the artist’s consideration of global migration patterns. These works represent the compulsory flow of nature, whether revealed in the sky, ocean, or over land, impervious to international boundaries.
Giorgia Lupi and Ehren Shorday, “Incroci (Crossings)”, 2022, Black paint on raw canvas
About the above work by Giorgia Lupi and Ehren Shorday–
Described by the artists as data portraits, this collaborative project emerged from Lupi’s observation that “each person’s life may be unique and different, but when seen together, these distinct paths begin to form patterns.” For Incroci, a dataset was created by asking strangers, and their social media circles, to share five dates (day/month/year) representing significant life moments, from the day of their birth up to the year 2022. The project was conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, which gave weight to the question of what could be considered a significant life moment. Incroci exemplifies the ways in which data visualization design is evolving to a level beyond merely providing an aesthetic framework for data to realizing subtext within the datasets. As Lupi states: “The more ubiquitous data becomes, the more we need to experiment with how to make it unique, contextual, intimate. The way we visualize is crucial because it is the key to translating numbers into concepts we can relate to.”
About the work above by Semiconductor–
Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, aka Semiconductor, have been collaborating for over 25 years working in sound, video, installation and sculpture. Referring to their work as technological sublime, they explore ways of experiencing nature mediated through the languages of science and technology. Spectral Constellations is a series of generative animations, driven by scientific data of young stars. This data, collected by scientists using a method called Spectroscopy, creates an understanding of structures around distant young stars, where gas and dust come together to form planets. Semiconductor have employed this spectral data as a physical material, translating it into rings of light which resemble gradiated discs of planetary and stellar formations. As the data ebbs and flows it introduces a sense of form and motion. Waveforms merge and interfere revealing patterns and rhythms, engaging our human tendency towards pattern recognition. The fragmented LED mosaics provide partial windows from which the spectral data shifts and shimmers.
Fernanda Bertini Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, “Wind Map”, 2012, Interactive software, dimensions variable
About Fernanda Bertini Viégas and Martin Wattenberg‘s Wind Map-
Fernanda Viégas, a computational designer, and Martin Wattenberg, a mathematician and journalist, are known as pioneers in the field of data visualization. Their research has helped define visualization as a discipline and practice, creating interactive and open-source tools for examining a wide range of scientific, social, and artistic questions. Conceived as a personal art project, their iconic work Wind Map culls information from the National Digital Forecast Database, which is maintained by the National Weather Service and available to the public. Continually gathering these forecasts, which are time-stamped and revised each hour, the artists have created a “living portrait” of the wind landscape over the United States. To emphasize the beauty and distinction of this influential work, exhibition curators commissioned a special iteration of Wind Map without the city locations and names. The standard version of this piece remains in the public domain on their website: http://hint.fm/wind/
Laurie Frick, “Moodjam Intense”, 2024 and “Moodjam Mild”, 2024, Abet Laminati samples on ACM panel
About Laurie Frick’s Moodjam Intense and Moodjam Mild-
In her exploration to humanize data, Frick creatively mines information from her own functional and behavioral patterns as part of her art practice. Inspired initially by the daily activity tracking of computer programmer Ben Lipkowitz, Frick began tracking her own sleep with an electroencephalogram headband, expanding it to her husband’s sleep patterns and then others. Initially mapping her moods with color swatches through Mood-jam.com, Frick expanded to track her temperament every few seconds using a combination of heart rate (HRV), facial recognition and galvanic skin response (GSR), assessing her stress, nervousness, and general mood every few seconds. The work shown is an interpretation of this compiled data, using boxes of countertop laminate samples that she sourced during an artist residency at the Headlands Art Center near San Francisco. Moodjam Intense and Moodjam Mild are the resulting gridded works.
Peggy Weil, “77 Cores”, 2024, White Mylar Digital print
About Peggy Weil’s 77 Cores–
Peggy Weil has long been engaged in exploring ways of seeing. Today she continues to inquire the realms of perception, investigating how we see, what we see, and how we can see beyond. When she heard about the Greenland Ice Sheets project which stores 2-mile-long poles of ice samples in meter long cylinders, she was compelled to document them. The ice cores-paleo thermometers holding ash from volcanic eruptions, pollen and environmental gasses-are, to Weil, “deep space holding very deep time.” As such they speak to the notion of the extended landscape: stretched out beyond what we perceive and see, hidden in the atmosphere or the earth underneath our feet. In 77 Cores, images of seventy-seven glacier ice-sheet cores are printed and laid out over twenty-four feet. allowing the viewer to mark time by walking its length.
Sarah Morris “Property Must Be Seen [Sound Graph]”, 2020; “Deviancy is the Essence of Culture [Sound Graph]”, 2020; “You Cannot Keep Love [Sound Graph]”, 2020, Household gloss paint on canvas
About Sarah Morris and the Sound Graph paintings above-
Sarah Morris creates films, paintings, and sculptures based on a wide range of sources, including graphic logos, architectural space, transportation systems and maps, GPS technology, and the movement of people in urban locations. She has said, “I want to map what is going on, these situations we find ourselves in-both physically and philosophically.” The Sound Graph paintings are derived from fragments of conversations and sounds recorded by the artist and translated into hard-edged geometric shapes in vibrant patterns that seem to visually fluctuate. Her interest in incorporating sound into her paintings began when she conceived the film Finite and Infinite Games (2017), titled after the cult philosophy and numbers theory novel by James P. Carse. Morris sees her paintings as being part of a larger self-generating system, always remaining open and allowing for interpretation, motion and change.
Mimi Ọnụọha, “The Library of Missing Data Sets”, 2016; “The Library of Missing Data Sets v2.0”, 2018; “The Library of Missing Data Sets v3.0”, 2022, Mixed Media Installation
Mimi Ọnụọha, “In Absentia”, 2019, 6 risograph prints on paper
About the works above by Mimi Ọnụọha–
The Library of Missing Datasets comprises three filing cabinets filled with folders the reveal unseen biases within the system of data collecting. According to the artist, this work is “a physical repository of those things that have been excluded in a society where so much is collected.” While data-collecting algorithms claim to provide comprehensive information, their vastness hides data-driven forms of inequity: what Ọnụọha considers “algorithmic violence.” Revealing the conditions surrounding invisible data, she “aims] to trouble assumptions baked into the beliefs and technologies that mediate our existences.” In Absentia (2019) presents six risograph prints in the style of twentieth-century African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’ infographics presented at Exposition Universelle, the Paris World’s Fair, in 1900. Ọnụọha visually quotes from Du Bois to acknowledge his work’s significance and the injustice it has since suffered: the US Department of Labor and Statistics halted publishing of his sociological research on Black rural life in Alabama, claiming it to be too controversial.
Finally, the image above is of work from Refik Anadol’s AI data painting series– California Landscapes.
Refik Anadol is an artist, designer, and leader in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. Utilizing advanced technologies including Al, machine algorithms, and quantum computing, he has become known for large scale, immersive installations that render massive amounts of data into highly dynamic abstractions. The artist’s California Landscape series employs images of California’s national parks. Spawned from a dataset of over 153 million images, the largest dataset of this kind ever to be used for an artwork, the Generative Study works feature images that are recognizable. Yet as these majestic landscapes constantly morph, so does the matter that we conventionally identify as earth and sky. A series of interconnected lines imbue the images with additional references, in this case the algorithm driving this perpetual visual flux. In its varying juxtapositions of nature and technology, this work reminds us of how distinctive our perceptions of each may be.
This exhibition closes 2/15/25.
The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by former New York magazine editor Adam Moss is a fascinating look at the creative processes of several famous artists. Each artist discusses specific works and gives the reader an inside look at how they came about.
