Information Design (sometimes called infoporn if you’re devious) are some popular things these days. Take the famous “cancer subway map” shown above, or look at the The New York Times, who regularly feature fantastic examples of the form, charts that are not only designed beautifully but are informative and fun, too.  There’s even a site featuring some bloopers that happened while working on some of them.

All of these examples, plus countless others all over the internet (like the data presentation-as-movie-poster we featured here) hew to one specific purpose: compile data into various charts, graphs, or even just basic numbers. Design beautifully. Present to public.

What got me thinking about the popularity and formulas of infographics is a new exhibition currently running through April 12th at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, which has much of the same underlying philosophy: it uses data to create art, only instead of presenting it as attractive charts and graphs, it features actual art installations that were ‘compiled’ through the use of various types of raw data.

It’s a fresh idea very much in line with the zeitgeist: harnessing the massive amounts of free data available online and organizing it in such a way that its conclusions are displayed not as numerical tables but pieces designed for contemplation. While all art is a collection and re-interpretation of data (visual, aural, etc, filtered through the eyes and brain of the artist), I’m unaware of a previous exhibition taking the accumulation and presentation of raw information so literally.

Featured in the exhibition are plenty of works from the well-known Aaron Koblin, including his “laser ranging system” last seen in Radiohead’s House of Cards video, plus his project called “Ten Thousand Cents“, where 10,000 online users (all anonymous) contributed to a master drawing of a $100 bill. If you click on any of the 10,000 portions of the bill, you can see a division between the original scan and an animation of the drawn re-creation. While the final result is, well, what you’d expect (a slightly iffy $100 bill), the fact that as an artwork, and has 10,000 anonymous artists and all the steps they took in its creation, is fascinating use of the ‘hive mind’.

Also featured in the exhibition is the grandfather of all great data-posters, by Charles Joseph Minard: Napoleon’s March to Moscow. This and other works like it (it was done in 1869) are the direct inspiration behind the great poster work at sites like historyshots: presenting data in an large, easily-digested, arresting, and beautiful format.

There’s plenty of art out there that uses raw data in various ways: various contemporary installations have been doing it for some time, and we might even make the argument that certain memorials function as great artworks, too. I’m thinking mainly of Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial, which, while admirably serving its primary function as a memorial to the dead, also works stunningly well on an aesthetic level, taking the chronological names of the war dead and displaying them in a unique fashion.

Most of today’s exhibits strive for a higher level of automation and calculation (in the computerized sense of the word).

This exhibit reminds me of another piece of data-art that came from Flickr some months ago, when they took geo-coded tags from all the people who tag the location where they took a photo (or have a camera that does it for them), and created a series of continental maps based on those co-ordinates. The results were remarkably accurate, and all generated entirely from photographic metadata.

It’s not so hard to envision dozens of future projects along the same lines, pulling raw data from a variety of sources and going beyond just a clean API integration, taking it into a completely unexpected space where the data functions as the primary creator behind a piece of art. This is the ultimate in “Container Art”, in that the real artistry is in the intake and manipulation of otherwise random or unadulterated data.

Something less automatic but no less enjoyable: this project putting two years’ of Twittering into a book, which is plenty interesting on its own, and mines a data source for a type of journal or log you simply are not going to see anywhere else. This is another example of raw data being transformed into a strangely personal kind of art. People complain that no one keeps journals anymore (wait, do they?), but here we have exactly that. You just have to move it off your computer and onto some paper.