In another piece, American Varietal, Salavon further aestheticizes an overview of data. The piece was commissioned for the new headquarters of the U.S. Census Bureau in Maryland. Salavon works with U.S. population data by county from 1790-2000, presenting the information as a gorgeous abstraction.

According to Salavon, colors represent the states, and data points that lie farther from the center of each plane represent more populous counties. But he says he prefers not to decode. Nor can viewers easily leap from the flyover to, say, an odd fact about Kings County in the 1800s. Instead, census data become sculptural material. They provide some ballast but are mostly overwhelmed by the artist's formal concerns.

Salavon has earned this piece, and it rewards the viewer who spends extended time with it. But other works that mainly aim to make data visually stunning can be problematic. If you scan Infosthetics, the inclusive central clearinghouse for new work, or Visual Complexity, you'll find gems, but also many pieces that misfire by being merely pretty. When infoviz goes wrong, it often goes wrong in this way.