Information art

also: data art · informatism

genre 1960s-present United States Europe

Information art - also called data art, sometimes informatism - takes data and information as its raw material: census tables, search results, network signals, archived images, sensor streams. It grew up beside conceptual art and the art-and-technology experiments of the 1960s and 1970s: engineer Billy Klüver founded Experiments in Art and Technology with Robert Rauschenberg in 1966, and in 1970 curator Kynaston McShine staged Information at MoMA, the first American survey of conceptual art and an early look at technology's impact on art. Where traditional art expresses feeling through form and pigment, information art reorganises found or generated data into images, installations, sound and software, drawing on mathematics, science, telecommunications and computing. Its contemporary span runs from net art and generative visualisation to climate data works such as Ed Hawkins's warming stripes.

'Something Else' large abstract painting on canvas, created together by two Dutch artist friends, Ben Vollers & Fons Heijnsbroek in 2008
'Something Else' large abstract painting on canvas, created together by two Dutch artist friends, Ben Vollers & Fons Heijnsbroek in 2008CC0 (credit: Fons Heijnsbroek) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Datasets, archives, or live signals used as the primary artistic material
  • The form of the data - its patterns, gaps and flows - becomes the visual composition
  • Mathematics, science, telecommunications and software treated as working media
  • Often time-based or generative, changing as its underlying information changes
  • Charts and maps pushed toward aesthetic experience, balancing legibility and abstraction
  • Frequently screen-, projection- or print-based rather than tied to a single physical object

Key figures

  • Kynaston McShine (1935-2013) — Curator of MoMA's landmark 1970 exhibition Information, which framed the field
  • Billy Klüver (1927-2004) — Engineer who co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology (1966), pairing artists with engineers
  • Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) — Artist who co-founded E.A.T. and treated technology and information as artistic material
  • Fernanda Viégas (b. 1971) — Data-visualisation artist (with Martin Wattenberg) whose Wind Map brought information art to the web

Example works

Sources

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