The audiences would be the artists and their life would be the arts

The advent of enormous repositories of digital information presents us with an interesting challenge. How can we represent and interpret such complex, abstract, and socially important data? In a new collaboration, Ear to the Ground, we have begun exploring ways to create experiential encounters with otherwise abstract data streams, especially through sound (http://cm.bell-labs.com/stat/ear). As part of our initial efforts, we gathered several examples of what we term data art, works produced by artists, designers, and engineers that challenge our traditional notions of information display. These pieces each have an aesthetic function, but because of their reliance on data, they also serve as a basis for forming inferences about the phenomena they describe.