Princeton University is having a new “Art of Science” competition, allowing students and researchs to contribute scientific visualizations of their work in art-gallery form, competing for (rather meager, unfortunately) prizes.
The three prize-winners will share $500, divided into shares of $250, $154.51 and $95.49 in accordance with the aesthetically pleasing golden ratio. Another 40 images are included in Princeton’s Art of Science 2013 exhibit, which opened on Friday in the atrium of Princeton’s Friend Center. The works were chosen from 170 images submitted from 24 different departments across campus.
The theme was of “Connections”, focusing on cross-disciplinary research. Follow the link to the full gallery of some of the best work.
via ‘Art of Science’ exhibit makes the connection between truth and beauty – Cosmic Log.
You were charitable, describing those prizes as “meager”! 3rd place wins $95.49! Criticism aside, this is a great idea. I really like that this work is finally acknowledged as art. Often, I enjoy data visualization, and science in general, because the depictions are aesthetically pleasing, beautiful. Examples: Henckel’s paintings of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny; Victorian naturalists’ drawings; Voroni sets; IPv6 treemaps from CAIDA.
The worst prize I ever saw, given effort required, was for a contest posted on IBM’s Smart Cities tumblr. It was a programming contest, demonstrating an original way of using some newly available sensor data collected by IBM. Submissions were to be working source code (which became property of IBM). 1st place was an IBM mug, mention by name on tumblr for 2nd and 3rd place. I wasn’t the only one who thought this was odd. Others did too, and whomever wrote the post argued about it in the comments! That is atypical for IBM. I’ll try to find the Tumblr post if it is still extant ;o)