Data Art on Visual Cinnamon

Rays

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was asked by a private equity firm to create a collection of artworks to celebrate the history of the company using the company’s data. The final collection, drawn using millions of tiny dots, consists of a main piece, two specific specializations and a set of five vibrantly colored monochrome versions.

Growing Cities

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In collaboration with the EPFL Laboratory of Urban and Environmental Systems, I transformed their scientific research on global urban growth into an aesthetic data artwork. By visualizing how cities like Shanghai and Beijing have evolved over two decades, I created an A0-sized piece that brings their findings to a wider audience in a beautiful, art-oriented way. The team aimed to move beyond traditional scientific charts to showcase their research through a more engaging lens. The design ensures that while the end result looks like abstract art at first glance, upon closer inspection, the viewer can clearly discern the underlying urban growth trends and individual city morphology.

Wall Artworks for New DNV Office

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was contacted through Avison Young Studio Project Services to create two large wall-filling artworks for DNV’s new office in Houston, Texas. They wanted to visually represent part of the data they provide, preferably with an energy and maritime focus, in a captivating way. I used two datasets from their “Energy Transition Outlook” to show the change in energy consumption between 2000 and 2050, and the projected maritime energy demand over the same period as a spiral with time flowing outward and the density of certain colors representing the different energy sources.

Time For CH₄nge Campaign

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was commissioned by the Environmental Defense Fund (through Fourtold) to create a data art hero image for their Time For CH₄nge campaign, designed to raise awareness about methane emissions and their impact on climate change. The challenge was to give form to the invisible: methane is a colorless, odorless gas, making its growing presence difficult to perceive. I developed a full data art system and interactive webpage, inviting users to enter their date of birth and experience how much methane has been added to the atmosphere during their lifetime, making the global issue feel personal and immediate.

GDQS Data Art Collection

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This six-piece data art collection, created for the GDQS Country Story Book by Intake, transforms Global Diet Quality Score (GDQS) data from over 80,000 individuals across 23 countries into vibrant visualizations. Each artwork symbolizes dietary patterns, using distinct visual elements — like wavy white lines for “Whole Grains” and bold red circles for “Red Meat” — to represent the 25 GDQS food groups. The centerpiece visualizes individuals’ dietary data as colorful rings, where the size and color of each section reflect the variety and quantity of foods consumed during a single day. Additional pieces explore unique themes: animal source foods, vegetables and tubers, sweets and processed foods, whole foods, and fruits, each inspired by familiar forms like lollipops or fruit slices. Inspired by universal experiences like shared meals, this collection celebrates the richness, diversity, and cultural nuances of global diets, offering a visually engaging narrative of dietary data and its impact.

The Essence of Us

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“The Essence of Us” is a subtly moving data art piece that asks the question “What defines Human Culture?” through the lens of the 5000+ exoplanets that have been discovered since the first in 1992. Data about the exoplanets is mapped to every visual aspect that you see. Earth, Us, is symbolically placed us in the center, and every spiral around it is one exoplanet. My intent was to create a slowly moving piece that you can stare into and wonder about that initial question, what defines human culture as a whole? This piece is still available for sale

Patchwork Kingdoms

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“Patchwork Kingdoms” is a data & generative art charity collection that I created for the Giga Connect project of UNICEF. All proceeds from the sale went to this project, which aims to connect all of the schools in the world to the internet. The Giga project has a dataset of 1 million schools and for ±280,000 of those they know if those schools are connected to the internet. I took this data about the schools, split it into 1000 subsets, and turned each school into a tiny square. All the squares together build up into two separate kingdoms, where those in the upright kingdoms are schools that are already connected to the internet, while those in the hidden / upside down kingdoms are not. Each of the 1000 pieces is thereby showing the “digital divide” that still exists in our world, and the funds from this sale will help to bring more schools from the hidden to the upright kingdom.

Wanderlust

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

“Wanderlust” is a data art + generative art collection, a BlockStyle, that I created for EthBlock.Art. My algorithm takes the transactional data from each Ethereum block in the blockchain and converts it into a unique, but deterministic, image, visualizing several aspects of each transaction. People are able to decide for themselves which block they wish to mint, thereby creating a collaboration between myself as the artist and the minters to define which the final blocks / images will be the final collection.

Elemental Flows

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a “Generative meets Data art” collection of 4 + 1, revealing data about some of the most important elements that we humans (now) need to live; Earth, Water, Air, Sun + Digital. They all stem from the same underlying algorithm. However, each piece is differently fine-tuned to form a representation of their element.

For this collection I combined elements of generative art and data art. Each piece uses the same underlying flow algorithm, but I’ve fine-tuned each to look like the element I’m trying to convey.

Wanderings of Stars

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The three pieces in this generative & data art collection reveal how the stars in our night sky are moving through the “lens” of how our current constellations are pulled apart as time is either moved 400,000 years into the past, the future, or both. These pieces place you as an outside viewer, looking at the night sky as a sphere with the stars and constellations drawn along the outside, and our Earth a theoretical speck in the center.

Landscape of Power Flows

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Swissgrid, the national transmission system operator in Switzerland, reached out to me because they wanted to explore an artistic way to visualize the data that is generated in their extra-high-voltage network of electrical grids. With over 60 million datapoints from the year 2019 it was quite a challenge to find the right balance of aggregating values while still showing as much detail as possible. The final result, called “Landscape of Power Flows”, became a giant work of 2m x 2.7m, printed on acrylic glass, and is now hanging in the lobby of Swissgrid’s main office in Aarau, where guests (and employees) can take in the whole visual, but also slowly explore the many details that reveal themselves the closer you get.

Re-imagining music’s ‘Gold Record’ with Data Art

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sony Music reached out to collaborate on creating a data-driven re-imagination of the ‘gold record’, the record certifications plaques that celebrate milestones in the journey of a song or album. Using data from the music itself and from Spotify and Youtube, such as the streams, playlists and chart positions, I created a data art system that creates a unique poster that shows the “data fingerprint” for each song. These posters are meant to be printed at the same size as the original gold records, at 40x50cm. I therefore had a lot of room to add visual details from the elaborate datasets. I aimed for a type of work that should be placed on a wall and every time you walk by, you can read a bit more and learn something new for weeks and months. Something that’s worth it to print and frame, that keeps on giving insights the longer you look. Something that you can appreciate visually in an instant, but it takes longer to gain insights (should you even want to).

Data art posters about music (streaming) data for Sony Music

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In April, Sony Music Entertainment reached out to me with a really interesting project idea. When a single or album sells more than a certain amount of units they become a gold or platinum record. The artist generally receives a framed vinyl or CD. But in these days of data being tracked everywhere and listening to music online, could I develop a more data art inspired version of a gold record using data from the actual streams, charts and the song itself. Well, that sounded like an amazingly fun project to sink my teeth into so I enthusiastically agreed!

A Year in Flights

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 14:11:52 +0200

This data art piece conveys the intricacies of a year’s worth of flights performed by Transavia, a Dutch airline. Each flight is turned into an abstract shape whose appearance is completely determined by the meta-data of that flight. Together they create a piece that is unique and crafted only from Transavia’s own data that still conveys general trends (holidays, destination shifts depending on season, charter flights, etc.), while also having an artistic feel. The final piece, measuring 3m x 1.5m, was placed in Transavia’s office to remind employees about the vast amounts of data that they can use in their day-to-day work.

Coding a “Reasons to” logo remix on my iPad

Sat, 22 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’d like to share some of my experiences about coding on an iPad…while in the desert of Namibia (*≧▽≦). Also list a few useful new SVG libraries I learned about (like animated SVG files, yes, a file). And of course show the end result of my Reasons to logo remix

Breathing Earth

Wed, 24 May 2017 10:33:57 +0000

We all know that our Earth goes through a seasonal cycle, especially for the latitudes farther away from the equator. In the fall the “deciduous” plants lose their leaves only to grow back again in the next spring. The animation happening in “Breathing Earth” shows how 50.000 circles move through all 52 weeks of 2016 and visualize the seasonal cycles. Thereby displaying the how vegetation health changes throughout the year and how plant growth & decline occur on different times and scales in the many regions across the Earth.

Marble Butterflies

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 22:13:23 +0000

Driven by butterfly data, let these generative butterflies free across your screen to evolve & develop and be mesmerized as your screen fills up with colorful paths. This was a personal exploration of combining data with generative art to create something that is based on data, but wants to engage its audience first and foremost, instead of teaching its audience about (the numbers within) the data.

The data sketches topic for February was nature and to me, nature is guided by randomness; mutations that happen without reason are the existence of evolution. And what is generative art if not driven (in part) by randomness.

Magic is Everywhere

Wed, 30 Nov 2016 08:00:40 +0000

In Magic is Everywhere I’ve investigated the titles of ±900 fantasy books to look for trends in their titles. Magic is the most common word in all titles. Followed by fire, dark & red. In general, terms relating to unpleasant things are more common than those relating to positive aspects. Nevertheless, titles relating directly to magic can be found throughout the visual, indicating that the one thing that binds fantasy books together is, not surprisingly, Magic.

Royal Constellations

Wed, 12 Oct 2016 22:19:30 +0000

Royal & aristocratic families are known for their fondness of marrying within their own clique. This leads to very interesting & entangled family trees which the Royal Constellations visual tries to convey. Dive into the web of family relations to see how all 10 of the current hereditary royal leaders of Europe can be connected to each other through their ancestors. By hovering and clicking on one of the 3000 stars, each of which represent a person, the web reveals aspects such as 6-degrees of separation and shortest paths between two people.

Visualizing the “Beauty of Math” in 3 minutes

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A very short blog where you can find the slides and video of the 3-minute elevator pitch I gave at the Reasons to conference in Brighton, UK on Wednesday September 7th 2016. And as a bonus some images of things that didn’t make it!

Beautiful color blending effects with SVGs & d3.js

Mon, 23 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In this short tutorial I want to introduce you to those wonderful color blending modes that you have (in Photoshop for example) where two colors overlapping each other can create another color. I actually started out trying to recreate this effect with SVG filters. But then I found out that it be done with just two lines of CSS.

Animating (dashed) lines and paths with d3.js & spirographs

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog I’ll explain how to animate both solid and dashed lines. To make things slightly less boring, I’ve created a spirograph drawing app for the examples. It came about because last week I wanted to animate a dashed line in a chart. Trying to use the technique I always apply for solid animated lines I suddenly found out that animating a dashed line isn’t trivial. It’s because of the fact that an animated solid line is, secretly, a dashed line, but I’ll go into that later.

Animating a heart shaped curve with d3.js

Sat, 14 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Just something small for Valentines day. I found the formula for a heart shaped curve on the Wolfram website and wanted to animate the line that draws these points with d3.js.

The Art in Pi

Sat, 24 Jan 2015 12:57:37 +0000

A visualization that turns the digits of the number π into a visual presentation. Each digit is converted into a certain direction to step. With 360 degrees of a circle, divided into 10 step directions. You can follow the path that the digits make and how this is always random, no matter if you look at 100, 1000, or even a million digits.

After seeing the examples of Martin Krzywinski’s π art work I wanted to venture into the world of data art myself. My idea of using the digits of π to step into a certain direction certainly isn’t new, but most versions I could find had first converted pi into another base (4 or 16 for example). Therefore, I went ahead with just keeping it in base 10. I plotted and colored the data in R and then imported the PDF into Illustrator to add some text and legends.

Exploring the art hidden in π

Sat, 24 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

While browsing online I came across several examples of Martin Krzywinski’s Pi art works and I was inspired to try and do a small project with the digits myself. I wanted to try and create something that wasn’t very informative per se, but hopefully pretty to look at, more like art.