Associate Professor of Statistics Gregory Matthews gave a presentation on the influence of statistics in modern art and many of his data art projects, and then held an interactive data art workshop.

The presentation and workshop took place at the “Beyond Data Viz: Data Art” event held on the fourth floor of the Information Commons on October 24.

Matthews said he chose to do this presentation because Loyola Libraries originally considered putting on a traveling art exhibit, which he said would have cost the library thousands of dollars.

Matthews, who has been creating statistical art since 2013, proposed his presentation to library staff because it would eliminate that cost.

The program was co-sponsored by the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and the Friends of the University Libraries program. The event was held in honor of National Friends of Libraries Week, which was created by the American Library Association in 2005 to express appreciation for US library donors.

The Friends of Loyola Libraries group was established in 2009 to encourage donations to the library, which help increase access to resources, including books and items from archives and special collections, according to Friends of the Libraries’. website. Donations also support the organization and sponsorship of events such as the Data Art presentation.

In addition to supporting Loyola’s libraries, Matthews said the event aligns with Loyola’s Jesuit philosophy of interdisciplinary learning opportunities.

“The idea of ​​being a liberal arts institution like the College of Arts and Sciences is kind of a well-rounded education,” Matthews said. “This is a kind of foundation of Jesuit education. And I think (data art is) an interesting subject because you’re mixing something that’s very much in the humanities and something that’s very much in the STEM world.”

Matthews first discussed how his views on art have changed over time. He said he used to have a narrow view of art and thought of it as simply “painting on a canvas”. Matthews said his wife, who earned her bachelor’s degree in art, exposed Matthews to a wider variety of art forms through trips to museums.

“Art was never presented to me in a way that was accessible to me as a numbers person,” Matthews said. “It was either you’re good at science or you’re good at art and there’s no in between. And that’s kind of a ridiculous way to introduce it to people.”

Matthews said he believes the data is meant to be intertwined with the art, given the importance of historical and societal context.

“Because of the world we live in, data art was bound to happen because everything is data,” Matthews said. “Everything you do, every email, every search you do, is tracked. It’s just generating data. And art reflects the world you live in, and the world you live in is dominated by data. And so I think it’s kind of a natural match.”

After his argument about the inevitability of data art, Matthews displayed some of the data art pieces he has created since he started in 2013. Many of these pieces are currently on display on the first floor of the Library Cudahy.

One work displayed by Matthews is Jason Salavon’s “Highest grossing movie of all time.” Matthews explained that Salavon’s work was created using computer software by digitizing the 1997 film “Titanic” and using coding to assign each frame of the film to a screen pixel.

Then, more code was written to make each pixel’s color the average color of the corresponding movie frame, creating an image that follows the movie timeline from left to right and top to bottom.

Matthews first saw “The Top Grossing Film of All Time” at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was exhibited in the Thorne Miniature Rooms exhibit. The piece immediately struck him as a particularly creative visualization of artistic data.

“I go to the art museum and I never think, ‘Oh, I want to see that,'” Matthews said. “I’m just wandering. But this one, for whatever reason, I said, “I’m going to see what that is.” I read about it and was even more excited about it when I saw it. This is incredible data art in my mind.”

Matthews also showed five images he generated, with coding software and AI, based on the results of Google image searches. These five works, titled “Clown,” “Celebrity,” “Rubber Duck,” “Idea,” and “Senator,” constitute Matthews’ Google Image Search series.

Third-year data science major Josie Peterburs, one of the program’s participants, said Matthews gave the same presentation during her Introduction to Data Science class in the spring semester of her junior year.

Peterburs said he remembers seeing the work in Matthews’ Google Image Search series both times he saw Matthews’ presentation. However, she was most surprised by how ubiquitous data art is around the world.

“There were examples that he showed that I didn’t realize would be considered data art, but they were interesting and they conveyed a message using data,” Peterburs said. “I only knew about data art because of Dr. Matthews and I think it’s a super cool thing to learn.”

Matthews said that data art differs from data visualization because the latter mainly serves to pictorially summarize data for informational purposes, such as graphs or charts. Instead, data art values ​​aesthetics and exists to incite an emotional response and deep thought in its viewers.

“Really successful art would make them think about things. For example, I would like people to think about, ‘are you comfortable with all the data being collected about you by private companies or corporations?'” Matthews said.

Near the end of the event, Matthews taught attendees how to create their own data art using R, a computer programming language used for data analysis, by modifying a piece he had already created. By copying Matthews’ codes for the piece, participants were able to alter the shapes, sizes, colors and line thicknesses of elements in the piece.

The event was mostly attended by statistics, data science, and computer science majors, including fourth-year data science major Samantha Fleming.

Fleming said she has taken several data science and computer science courses taught by Matthews and heard him give the same presentation on the art of data during her Intro to Data Science classes.

Fleming said she was always interested in art, but fell in love with data science during her sophomore year during an analysis of a dataset in one of her classes. The class explored a dataset of baby names to find the most common unisex baby name, she said.

“You can’t do that by counting, because you’re trying to find the intersection of the one that’s the most used, but also the most even across the sexes,” Fleming said. “It was Ocean, and that blew me away, because you can’t find that by counting. You have to study the data, get into it, and it really opened my mind.”

Overall, Matthews’ presentation emphasized the impact of data art as an art form.

“Good art can change the world in a way that an academic paper will not,” Matthews said. “I think you can make people think about questions and reflect on deep questions with art much more easily than with academic papers and academic papers. That’s why I think art is important and data art is important.”