Making Art with Data

Check out this TED Talk by Jer Thorp, an artist who writes code to create cool visualizations that put raw data into a human context. Jer shares his passion for data analysis with the audience by showing off his greatest designs that revolve around data.

One of the first projects he shows is a simulated economy where pixels trade colors with one another. (This does not involve data, but this is what got him started in “coding” art.)

Next he starts sharing graphics that show how many times “terrorism” appears in news articles versus the word “communism,” or the words “Iran” and “Iraq,” or “hope” versus “despair.”

My favorite project is “Just Landed,” where he was mapping locations of people tweeting where they just landed at. Not only are his designs aesthetically pleasing but can also be used as a reference to see how people move.

Jer then shows the results of his code called Cascade. The tool Cascade can be used to see how people share content on the Internet. This data is used by news sources such as The New York Times, where Jer works. This kind of stuff is insanely useful, especially for big news distributors. This code could also be used by social media companies to track how much their ads are being seen and how their product is being shared.

It is cool to think that after Jer does all the hard work of coding, he can just sit back and look at the beautiful data masterpiece he has created. Some of his art is very moving, like the placement of names on the 9/11 Memorial or a piece capturing his own travel history. He also makes a strong argument that his tools, which help us see the art in data, make data more human and encourage us to use data in a more ethical manner.