Infoviz art is at its best when it maintains a tension between science and art, technology and design. Ideally, it's an answer to the famous complaint from scientist and writer C.P. Snow about the "gulf of mutual incomprehension" between scientific and humanistic thinkers. The work also shines when it asks us to peer into data when we weren't otherwise looking. Artist Aaron Koblin, for instance, helped to create this music video for the song "House of Cards," by the band Radiohead. Released in July, it uses technologies like a 3-D scanner to evaluate distances among objects and generate point cloud data. In one of the most compelling moments, the landscape appears to dissolve or drift apart in granular fragments, a nod to the data it's made up of. Radiohead also posted the raw scanner data online so anyone can browse them while listening to the song, or play with them and make something new.

The piece invites us to see something that its maker might not have. In that sense, it celebrates (or flatters) our ability to probe and discover. Like other exemplars of infoviz art, it holds out the hope that we could all be more creative than we seem to be.