The subject is art, the theme is “truth” and the medium is data. The University of Virginia’s School of Data Science is hosting its annual Data Is ART Competition, inviting artists and data scientists to transform data into compelling visual narratives.
In its third year, the competition is open for submissions until Sunday from artists across disciplines related to this year’s theme: what truth looks like in data. Awards include a grand prize of $2,500.
Finalists’ work will be announced at a fall ceremony and publicly exhibited. In its inaugural year in 2024, the competition drew more than 130 submissions from seven countries and four continents.
Past finalists include Julia Daser and Pepi Ng, a pair of artists based in New York City who built an installation highlighting the often-invisible labor associated with menstruation.
Since winning their first data art competition at UVA, Daser and Ng continue to create together. (Contributed photo)
“Stained Underwear” is an open-source project (the artists’ source code is available on GitHub). The installation features a robotic arm that moves in a sink to simulate the labor of washing underwear.
“We transferred personal data into a microcontroller that controls the robotic arm that you see in the installation, which then scrubs underwear in a sink the same number of times,” said Ng, a creative technologist and community organizer teaching robotics at the Queens Public Library through NYC First, an organization that aims to make robotics more accessible.
Hoping to confront stigmas, “we really wanted to make it a physical piece that takes up space and room to show that data that is usually behind closed doors and not accessible to people that don’t menstruate,” said Daser, a creative technologist working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The pair is currently exhibiting a new installation about bird migration patterns at Arizona State University.
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