In pictures: Data Art

Extract of Charles Joseph Minard's map of Napoleon's march to Moscow

This map of Napoleon's march to Moscow was created by Charles Joseph Minard in 1869. The chart plots army size, geographical location and temperature. The outward journey is in brown and the return is in black; when his army was hugely reduced in number.

Close up of Napoleon's march by Charles Jospeh Minard (1869)

This is a close up of Charles Joseph Minard's 1869 chart of Napoleon's 1812 Russian campaign. Napoleon's returning army was reduced from 50 000 to 28 000 crossing the Studienska river, illustrated by the halving in width of the black line.

y Aaron Koblin using flight patterns data

Aaron Koblin created this from data provided by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. It shows all the flights in the USA in a single day. Each individual line represents a particular flight and is colour coordinated for each airline company.

An image made up of over 80 000 pictures of sunset and sunrise

A year of sunrises and sunsets 2008. Sunrise and sunset photos on Flickr were positioned on a graph according to the day (horizontally) and hour (vertically) they were taken. The bands show the changing time of sunset and sunrise during the year.

An image from the Spam Architecture series by Alex Dragulescu. These are generated by a computer program that uses junk email as input. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modelling gestures.

Ten thousand cents; a digital artwork by Aaron Koblin

"Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima. It was part of the exhibition (though, strictly, it's not compiled from data!) and it shows 10 000 individual drawings merged to create an image of a $100 bill.

A close up of the "Ten Thousand Cents" art work by Aaron Koblin

Ten thousand individuals were each given a fragment of the dollar bill to copy using a computer drawing tool. The artists combined those 10 000 micro-images to complete the dollar. Each participant was paid one cent.

This is a close up of the "Ten Thousand Cents" artwork by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima. Here the individual contributions become clear. All participants were anonymous and were unaware of the ultimate goal. The project took five months to complete.