What Do Visualization Art Projects Bring to the VIS Community?

Visualization art projects have flourished over the last decades. They make the artistic use of data and visualization to "embody a forceful point of view", "with the intent of making art." The visualization community has actively embraced the trend, from the early trials of Art Exhibition/Show to nowadays the biggest associated event in the main VIS conference, the VIS Arts Program (VISAP). Hundreds of innovative and creative visualization art projects have been exhibited, attracting submissions from artists, designers, and practitioners who are not regular VIS conference participants.

On the other side, visualization art projects present obvious differences from mainstream visualization research in terms of author teams, targeted audiences, topics, designs, authoring tools, etc. At VISAP's 12th anniversary, it is worth looking into what these artistic explorations bring to the community.

The key theme of this panel is to discuss the relations between visualization art projects and visualization research. An initial set of topics is proposed to spark the discussion, including the role of data, the use of visual encoding, perception, authoring tools, and the impacts of visualization art projects to the community.