Art & Scale
About the project
Art & Scale is a data visualization project developed in partnership with the Smithsonian Museum, focused on exploring the physical dimensions and visual impact of artworks from The Revolutionary Era Art Collections. The project shifts attention away from iconography and style to examine scale as a meaningful variable, asking how the size of an artwork influences perception, intimacy, and presence across different historical decades.
Process
The project began with the analysis of a dataset containing the real-world dimensions of paintings and 18th-century miniatures. These measurements were cleaned, normalized, and categorized by time period to identify patterns and contrasts over time. Through iterative prototyping, different visual encodings and interaction models were tested to ensure that scale differences were not just readable as data, but viscerally understandable. Particular attention was given to maintaining dimensional accuracy while adapting the artworks to a screen-based environment.
Solution
The final solution is an interactive visualization that translates real physical dimensions into a comparative visual space, allowing users to explore artworks at different scales and directly perceive their size relationships. By visualizing both extremely small and large works within the same system, Art & Scale highlights how scale functions as a historical, cultural, and experiential factor. The project offers an alternative way of engaging with museum collections—one that emphasizes materiality and embodied perception alongside historical context.