There is an old folktale people tell their children. It’s called “Stone Soup.” It has many variants, but it goes roughly like this: A beggar arrives in a wealthy village and knocks on doors to ask for food. Nobody will give him anything, so the ingenious beggar comes up with a plan. At one last door, instead of asking for food, he offers to cook something very unique — stone soup. He says all it needs is water and a special stone. The homeowner is curious and agrees to it. Quickly, the beggar begins asking for additional ingredients to make the soup even better. Every single vegetable and meat eventually ends up in it, and the soup is, of course, delicious — although the proverbial stone had nothing to do with it.

Those who become interested in the use of data in art and design inevitably learn about the work of great designers, programmers, and artists like Edward Tufte, Ben Fry, and others. The news media almost unavoidably uses data visualization — “data viz” — as a tool to explain complex ideas that involve large numbers, shifts in time, vast geographical distributions, and the various correlations among them. Nicholas Feltron even popularized the idea of harvesting data to visualize your personal life.

In the world of art and design, data is treated as a magic ingredient that will spice up anything. It immediately smacks of relevance, hard facts, and visible connections to invisible layers of our world and coexistence.

As with any popular idea, “data as art” has produced mixed results. But there is one particular instance of this I want to focus on, and that is the use of data as a fake ingredient. What do I mean by “fake”? Often, data is mentioned in an artwork’s marketing materials but does nothing noticeable or meaningful to the work itself.

If the artwork is good, you won’t need to expose its attributes.

Some might ask: Why bother? Who cares if the data is used effectively?

We should care when the marketing of art lies about the art itself.

We see this with words like “interactivity” and “immersion.” People who market new media art activations dig a grave when they promise to “immerse you” in an “interactive environment” where you will be able to “be creative” with others. Artists who support this type of hypespeak distract from the quality of the work itself and send their audiences on a wild goose chase that inevitably ends in frustration. Why not just focus on the work?

This is a question I’ve often asked of the work of Refik Anadol. Since 2015, he has been producing large-scale particle animations that look quite pretty. In themselves, they are similar to works produced by talented motion designers such as Maxim Zhestkov. But Anadol claims to add the magic ingredient: “data.” The best example of this is his work called Virtual Depictions. Let’s look at this description of the work on the artist’s website:

Through architectural transformations of media wall located in 350 Mission’ lobby, main motivation with this seminal media architecture approach is to frame this experience with a meticulously abstract and cinematic site-specific data-driven narration. As a result, this media wall turns into a spectacular public event making direct and phantasmagorical connections to its surroundings through simultaneous juxtapositions.

This grandiose statement seems to create a powerful set of correlations between a city, its people, and its architecture. But looking at the animations, one sees a series of motion graphics tropes that only work in this case because they have been enlarged to architectural scale.