rollerblading underpants: When sculpting with data, does vagueness make art?

Casey Rentz, contributor

(Image: Fernanda Vi?gas and Martin Wattenberg )

Data visualisation pioneer Edward Tufte once said, ?The leading edge in evidence presentation is in science; the leading edge in beauty is in high art.? But can evidence be art?

A new exhibition at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, at the University of California, Irvine, asks that very question. As I wind through DataVis: Information as art, I find sculptures and sound installations curiously juxtaposed with graphs and charts. Not the usual gallery fare.

Leaning into a microphone perched in front a screen filled by a rotating globe of words - with different clusters of phrases roughly depicting continents - I say, ?London?. A pulsating blue sphere appears over that spot on the globe and I started hearing sounds: a bottle opening, a moped starting, glasses clinking. ?Sao Paulo,? I say next, and another pulsating sphere appears as sounds of Brazilian music are layered into the mix. The piece, World Sound Mix by Junichi Oguro and Motohiro Sunouchi, is the artists? attempt to make an auditory map of the world. My ears are intrigued.

Sitting next to the sound collage is another type of map, and it is visually stunning. Over a black diagram of the US, white lines flow and whip around in striations and curlicues, like bent wheat bailing itself. In Windmap by Fernanda Vi?gas and Martin Wattenberg, the white lines represent wind strength: the thicker the line, the stronger the wind in that geographic location. As the lines continue to move, streaming wind data, I am mesmerised. It looks like something out of Where the Wild Things Are. It makes me want to go into meteorology.

On the next wall hang four computer screens displaying what I?m used to seeing when I think of data visualisation: digital maps of things like increasing urbanisation and cellphone usage. The demonstration is a showcase of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Senseable City Lab?s work, sponsored by companies like AT&T and Audi, and it is displayed with the precision and finish you?d see at a tech expo - hanging on a white wall with a deluxe, minimalist mouse in front. In addition to telling a story, the maps are stunningly intricate and, dare I say, beautiful. But is this art?

Moving beyond maps and globes, the exhibit gets even more abstract. In one corner of the gallery sit two beautiful basket-woven sculptures of bright orange and dull blue by Nathalie Miebach. Called The Ghostly Crew of the Andrea Gail and Musical Buoy in Search Towards a New Shore, the two spiral cone-pyramids look something like a basket-weaver's monument to a carnival, with sticks, round pegs and flags sticking out all over. Apparently, the sculptures were modelled using the barometric pressure and wind speed data of a storm that capsized a ship called the Andrea Gail in 1991 - but it is frustratingly unclear how the artist used the data (one basket weave inch per unit of barometric pressure?) to construct the piece.

Alice Aycock, who often creates seductive shapes in her work and is one of the best-known artists in the show, has contributed several inkjet prints of curving, fringed figures. These simultaneously seem to resemble colourful nudibranchs - sea slugs - and the geometric form known as the Calabi-Yau manifold. They are supposed to be modelled after ?an abstract mathematical concept derived from equations by Alfred Enneper?, but my curiosity about what equations those may be goes unsatisfied. I?m frustrated by vagueness again. Or is it the vagueness that makes it art?

My mind drifts back to the MIT Senseable City Lab exhibit and how satisfyingly explicit it is. Then, I look up and notice the striking and tranquillising Hurricane Prototype No. 1 by I?igo Manglano-Ovalle.

This glass-fibre and aluminium model of a hurricane dangles from the ceiling, looking like a rounded, misshapen airplane propeller. Its curves are as seductive as its materials are harsh and industrial. The artist used real data from a hurricane, frozen in action, to shape it. Though once again I am left to wonder how these data points correspond to the compelling curves hanging before me, aesthetically it is my favourite piece in the exhibition.

As I leave the gallery, I am thoroughly confused as to how these different pieces fit together as part of one exhibition. Sure, both the explicit maps and more interpretive sculptures use scientific data as a jumping-off point. But they differ tremendously as to how the result itself is supposed to be interpreted or experienced.

Curator David Familian says, ?It?s about how data is animated or brought to life in some way. It?s not just a set of numbers.? But for me, knowing what those underlying numbers are - and represent - is part of the allure.

DataVis: Information as art runs at the Beall Center for Art & Technology at the University of California, Irvine, until 26 January 2013.