Sophie Ashdown

There are two key people that I’m focussing on in my research which are Nathalie Miebach – a german born artist creating beautiful collages and sculptures based on environmental data, and David McCandless who is a designer and data journalist creating beautiful data visualisations.

What is lucky about using these two people is that they are both still alive, so I have an opportunity to ask them questions. I don’t know if they will respond to me, but it is worth a try.

I have spent some considerable time thinking about what I can ask them, so that:

• their answers will give relative insight to my research
• having personal responses from them will add a unique feature to my paper
• the questions are interesting enough that they will actually want to respond

At first I thought I would send the same set of questions to each of them, but then it became clear that their approaches to creating art from data are so different that there must be some nuanced differences to get the most from their responses.

Currently I’m thinking of sending them a set of questions that are the same, plus an extra set of questions that is specific to them.

I started to prepare some questions but ultimately went too far and had WAY too many questions. Initially I had about twenty questions for each person, but I’ve got it narrowed down to about seven or eight each now.

Here is the shortlist of questions I currently have for Nathalie (still very much in draft):

• What first drew you to working with data as a creative material, and what continues to motivate you?
• How do you decide which datasets are worth visualising?
• How and why do you choose specific art materials to represent the data points?
• Your sculptural work often represents the data with standard geometric forms such as circles, squares, and lines. What draws you to using these shapes?
• Does your use of these geometric elements draw influence from your studies such as constellations in Astronomy or art movements (eg Constructivism) in Art?
• How do you balance the scientific integrity of the data with the artistic license commonly required to make sculpture?
• If you could give one piece of advice to students or artists working with data in their art, what would it be?

The tricky part is trying to weave in a question related to Constructivism, because I don’t even know if it is anywhere on their radar. I really need to work on this part.

I will review these questions with Gia before I send them out.

The even trickier part may be getting them to respond.

I don’t want to hit them both up with loads of questions to begin with, so I’m also crafting an email where I introduce myself and the research, then ask just three or four questions to begin with.

Hopefully if they reply to my first email then I can ask them further questions down the line.

If they don’t reply then I can follow up with another email and perhaps just ask if they can answer one or two questions.

And if they still don’t reply I’ll probably still try one more time because I can be quite persistent! (In the nicest possible way of course!)