Tatiana Plakhova’s Abstract Data Art Evokes Ghostly Jellyfish
Tatiana Plakhova’s creations have a mysterious, diaphanous beauty.
It may surprise you to hear that we've been especially impressed lately with data visualizations that tell you little or nothing about the actual data in them. But sometimes these creations are so bewitching that they transcend the label "infographics" and become something else -- not quite fine art, but some sort of cyborg collaboration between what Kevin Kelly calls "The Technium" and one human soul.
Russian designer Tatiana Plakhova creates visualizations that fit this mold, turning quanta of information into diaphanous, delicate visuals that look like something the aliens from The Abyss would create if they had access to Google's APIs.
Plakhova didn't give much detail on her process or inspirations when Co.Design asked, but maybe that's a good thing -- staring into the sparkling, whirling depths of a piece like "Light Beyond Sound" might actually lose some of its appeal if I knew too much about what mundane database had spawned the raw material. I'd rather just marvel at the fact that in this day and age, artists can conjure up otherworldly wonders on the level of Close Encounters of the Third Kind without even picking up a brush, pencil, or camera.
