Data Design

I've recently learned that data is not only used to create statistics, but people actually turn it into art.
Artists: Jer Thorp, James Paterson, and Mario Klingemann have combined data and design.










These pieces were exhibited at the Pink Hobo Gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

For this exhibition these artists have been brought together by Flashbelt.

One of the Artists, Jer Thorp did a 60 square foot piece which "represented all of the players in the economic crisis" another piece of his at the same size is a "visualization of the financial crisis using newspaper data."

Article Website



Jer Thorp is out of these three artist, I have discussed in this post the one, that uses data and art the most.


"British Columbia's 'liberal' government has announced its plans to make staggering to arts funding over the next year."

"I created a dataset from the September Budget Update (bcbudget.gov.bc.ca/2009_Sept_Update/) to get a better handle on how these cuts fit in with the rest of the budget."

"There are 114 items in the budget with expenditures of $1M or higher. Arts & Culture funding moves from the 57th highest expenditure at 19.5M in 2008/2009 to the 100th highest expenditure in 2009/2010 with less than 3.7M in funding."

"When the 114 expenditures are ranked by gain or loss, the picture becomes even more clear. With a loss of more than 80%, Arts & Culture is suffers the second worst cuts - with the worst being another Arts-related line item!"







"GoodMorning! is a Twitter visualization tool which shows about 11,000 tweets collected over a 24 hour period between August 20th and 21st. The tweets were harvested to find people saying 'good morning' in English as well as several other languages."

"The tweets appear as blocks and are colour-coded. Green tweets are early in the morning, orange tweets are at about 9am, and red tweets are later in the morning. Black tweets are 'out-of-time' messages (sent at times that aren't in the morning at that location)."

"Built in Processing (processing.org) using Twitter4J, and a home-brewed client for MetaCarta's geo-parsing APIs."

Though this data has little use, it is graphically pleasing and more of Jer Thorp's work can be viewed by clicking on his name.

James Paterson

Mario Klingemann