media
18/06/2025
Harvard Magazine
Algorithms govern much of our lives today. They likely brought you to this article, will shape how you interact with it, and serve as the unseen engine behind countless moments in your day. But we seldom look at algorithms the way we’d view a painting on a wall—considering how the design of data and datasets shapes our perception of the world.
Viewing data as brushstrokes was one goal of the Data | Art symposium, held on June 11 and 12 at the Harvard University Center for Geographic Analysis (CGIS) and co-hosted by Harvard’s metaLAB and Northeastern University’s Barabási Lab. The two-day conference brought together artists, technologists, scientists, and designers working at the intersection of culture and code. It encouraged them to weave data into art—and to use art to explore how data is transforming reality.
“Data is often called the oil of the 21st century. But unlike oil, data is not a natural resource—it is shaped, performed, and designed,” said Kim Albrecht, principal at metaLAB and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, who co-organized the conference with Jeffrey Schnapp, the Pescosolido professor of Romance languages and literatures Northeastern professor Albert-László Barabási. “As a cultural artifact, it must be framed, questioned, and reimagined. Art is uniquely equipped to do that.”