Art Pathway C: See Data in Art & Make Data as Art(Overview)
< Back to Building BlockArts provide students with ways to communicate and express their emotions, feelings, and even information. Additionally, the arts play a big role in the design and representation of data to share information but also to evoke feelings (such as infographics that lay out text and numbers to convey meanings). Data practices are important from understanding the world to influencing how decisions are made. Data visualizations can be used to convey information (and misinformation) in ways that prioritize some things over others.
This building block, challenges educators to consider: How can students use art to represent and communicate meaning from data? How can principles from art inform the design of data visualizations? While the connection between art and data practices may not seem like a natural fit, this integration pathway shows how art and data practices could be mutually beneficial.
This building block highlights two practices to integrate computational thinking in the Arts classroom.
- Data as Art
- Data in Art
Practice C1 focuses on how to:
- Analyze data visualizations to understand how design is used to communicate meaning
- Use art to represent and communicate data
- Create artistic works that incorporate data
Practice in Action
C1.1 An activity using this practice could have students analyze a data visualization to identify what data is being used, how that data is shown, what effect those visuals have (what story are they telling, what effect does it have on viewers), & evaluate whether the visualization tells the data story well. A lesson plan example of an activity with this design principle can be found here: Deconstructing a Data Viz
C1.2 An activity using this practice could have students use physical materials to represent data in a 3D sculpture A lesson plan example of an activity with this design principle can be found here: Data Sculpture
C1.3 An activity using this practice could ask students to produce and visualize personal data using Dear Data
Practice C2 focuses on how to:
- Analyze artistic works using data
*C2.1 also appears in Pathway B (Explore Art Through Computational Thinking ) as practice B3.3.
Practice in Action
An activity using this design principle could have students plot the facts versus the events in artistic works based on a true story (e.g., Based on a true story)