David Lu: Three Views of the Senate

Artist(s):

• David Lu

Title:

Three Views of the Senate

Exhibition:

• SIGGRAPH 2005: Threading Time

Creation Year:

2005

Medium:

Web-based art

Category:

• Interactive & Monitor-Based

Artist Statement:

Three Views of the US Senate (2003) is a political data visualization that uses dynamic typography to tell a story about the makeup of the United States Senate prior to the then-upcoming 2004 elections. In particular, senators are presented by party, by year of next election, and by state. The story that emerged from the data was an open ended one: could the Democrats retake the Senate?The project uses data scraped from Project Vote Smart, an online political database, by a robot written in Python. The visualization itself was designed in Adobe Illustrator and implemented in Processing. A Java-enabled web browser is required to view this piece.