When Data Becomes Art: Making Information Feel Human

What if the way we display data is, itself, a moral question? That's the quietly provocative idea at the heart of Marthe Viallet's work — and the thread that runs through every minute of this episode. Marthe joined us from Paris to talk about data art, the ethics of visualization, the Paris 2024 Olympics, and why a bar chart about COVID deaths should never look the same as one about the stock market.

From Law School to the Musée du Quai Branly

Marthe's path is anything but linear. She began with a degree in public finance law, then worked in the budget department of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris — surrounded by artworks all day. "There were already these two appetites working together," she told us. A consulting firm came next, where she spent five years transforming expert reports into large-format visual posters for decision-makers in French industry.

"It's not because you're talking to a decision-maker that something needs to be boring. The goal was clarity — and that requires smart design choices." During COVID lockdown, she decided to go further: to treat data not just as an analytical tool but as a noble material that could reveal the excellence of an organization — and eventually discovered an international ecosystem of data artists doing exactly that.

Design is not a layer of beauty. It is the condition for meaning. When you have very numerous pieces of information that need to connect — you must prioritize. And that goes through design. — Marthe Viallet

Making Sports Research Beautiful for Paris 2024

The project Marthe describes with the most visible joy is Trajectoires, a data art exhibition she created for INSEP — France's National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance — ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. The brief: take complex sports research normally buried in scientific papers and make it accessible, emotional, memorable.

"My challenge was to make this data sexy, attractive, and sublime." The exhibition featured data portraits of elite athletes — including judo champion Teddy Riner's extraordinary career trajectory — and biomechanical research visualizations like how a muscle unfolds during a sprint. "For once, the researchers were the stars."

What made Trajectoires work

• Deep collaboration with researchers, treated like editorial journalism

• Museum-style labels alongside each visualization — multiple entry points for different audiences

• A minimum of six months from brief to public exhibition opening

• Sublimating research work that was previously only accessible in scientific papers

The Ethics of the Bar Chart

This is the moment in the episode that stays with you. When Marthe gives lectures, she shows her audience two curves — titles hidden. She asks: what do these represent? Then she reveals the answer. One is the stock market. The other is the daily death toll from COVID-19.

The room immediately goes quiet. It's crazy that we use the same visual codes for a financial table and for human loss. We finished by not putting conscience of the gravity of the situation — because every night on French television, the same basic standardized graphic carried no emotion. — Marthe Viallet

Her argument isn't that dashboards are bad. It's more precise: when the subject is human — loss, suffering, inequality — the visual form we choose carries an ethical weight. Standardized charts can mask that weight. "Not all data should be visualized the same way. It's a question of ethics."

DEN Airport: What Could Emotional Data Look Like?

Our board member Renata, lead strategic data analyst at Denver International Airport, sparked one of the episode's most energetic exchanges: what would it look like to bring data art to DEN? "People usually associate airports with stress," she noted. "What if we showed the data in a meaningful emotional way that would put a smile on someone's face?"

Marthe's ideas came fast: interactive installations where travelers answer a question and their response shapes the visualization in real time. Data physicalization, physical objects people can touch. Data sonification, turning airport flows into sound. "There are a million things to do. We could have a plane with data represented."

New York: Brooklyn Artists Meet Particle Physics

On a family holiday in New York, Marthe spotted an email invitation from the New York Design Center for an exhibition called Before the Measure — featuring Brooklyn artists Chris Klapper and Patrick Gallagher, whose work was developed with Fermilab, the American particle physics laboratory.

The artists showed their finished works to the researchers they'd interviewed. The scientists' response: "That's exactly it. We couldn't represent it, but you succeeded in putting into images what we had in mind." That moment — when art gives shape to science that science itself couldn't articulate — is exactly what Marthe chases in her own work.

The Future: Data Literacy From Childhood

Marthe sees data art reaching into schools and everyday culture, not just institutions. She tests data visualization concepts with her eight-year-old daughter. She cites Giorgia Lupi at Pentagram, who speaks of the "humanism of data," and researcher David Bihanic, who called data designers "the new explorers of our globalized world."

Data To Art, the international online gallery she co-founded with developer Yan Holtz, is her concrete contribution to that future: a permanent archive of data art that makes the work discoverable and preserves projects that might otherwise disappear from the internet.

Three Artists to Explore

Marthe recommended these three data artists for listeners wanting a starting point:

Gabrielle Mérit

🇫🇷 French · Based in the US

Data collage — placing human faces onto difficult topics including war and conflict.

Tiziana Alocci

🇮🇹 Italian

Data sonification — transforming datasets into sound in deeply poetic ways.

Anne-Laure Fréon

🇫🇷 French

Large physical data objects — including a giant necklace representing river data.

She also recommended Kirk Goldsberry for his visual tributes to LeBron James' shot trajectory ("it's like fireworks — it's sublime"), and Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic for anyone in a business context who presents data regularly.