H79.2854 Lecture 4 Credits
Instructor(s): Marsh
We are living in the midst of a data explosion: a sudden accumulation of
huge volumes of data— much of it readily accessible online—describing
our everyday world from global economic fluctuations to social
networking trends and traffic patterns. But how does this raw data
become narrative? What alchemy transforms data from information into
meaning? And when data is collected and selected, what’s been omitted or
erased? Data visualization typically is illustrative and utilitarian,
but data can be unraveled and re-expressed, transformed into something
more. We will examine information design strategies and the visual
language of the infographic as a starting point in creating our own
data-based art works. We will experiment with approaches to data that
are playful, reverent, poetic, subversive, and ultimately narrative. We
will consider works by Alex Dragalescu, Christian Nold, Edward Tufte,
Eric Rodebeck, and Chris Jordan. Students will use Processing, and work
with data se
ts and APIs to generate dynamic interactive programs, screen-based
artworks, and digital prints.
