Meeting Documents

From Data to Wonder: Transforming NASA Data into Art

Abstract

How do you make 150 petabytes of Earth and space data accessible to everyone? NASA's vast scientific repositories contain treasures that advance our understanding of Earth, our solar system, and the universe beyond—but these datasets often remain isolated within scientific communities. Through artist-scientist collaborations, we are transforming raw data into immersive public art experiences that invite participation and foster new ways of knowing. For more qualitative experiences, we emphasize the waveforms in static data sets through animation, non-linear time, and normalized time series to bring data from very different methodologies into context with each other.

Our ongoing collaboration has created several new pieces. In December 2024, the top of San Francisco's Salesforce Tower became a nightly data visualization, where public environmental data was transformed into animated light displays visible across the city, reaching thousands of daily commuters with stories of their local ecosystem. In April 2025, "To The Sun" premiered at UC Berkeley's Sather Tower—a participatory carillon concert that converted Parker Solar Probe data into music, inviting audiences to hear the sun's magnetic fields and plasma waves.

Future collaborations include an installation blending ocean data with neuroscience research to create synchronized experiences of light, sound, and vision and a piece translating light curves from the Seven Sisters in the Pleiades system into "visual voices"—allowing audiences to feel stellar dynamics through music and illumination.

These collaborations show how artist-scientist partnerships can democratize scientific knowledge, creating new entry points for communities to engage with NASA's discoveries while generating new questions and perspectives that enrich both scientific inquiry, appreciation for the unknown, and artistic expression.