When manipulating data becomes art

When is data massage and manipulation entirely appropriate? When it's in the hands of an artist participating in enSight, a Scottish project that gives artists access to raw experimental output for inspiration.An initial pilot in April, which has just culminated in the first online exhibition, was so successful that the organizers are already gearing up for the next round. How it works is that the enSight team asks scientists to submit an original electronic image of raw data or figures, then artists create a rough sketch of their initial instinctive response to the image. Next, each scientist-artist pair puts their heads together (by Email) to create a piece of art in any medium, and finally, the three components -- raw data, rough sketch, and final project -- are compiled in a triptych work, and exhibited both live and virtually on the enSight Web site."We wanted to give researchers an...