Donna Cox
USA, 1949
Donna Cox is an artist and pioneer of scientific visualization who has spent decades turning complex data into cinematic images.
Artwork in the Encyclopedia of New Media Art archive
Art of Scientific Visualization Compilation
About the artwork
This compilation brings together some of the most compelling scientific visualizations created by Donna Cox and her team at the Advanced Visualization Lab, drawn from twenty years of work shown around the world in IMAX films, digital dome shows and television. Each sequence is computer-rendered and animated from real scientific data, evaluated for accuracy yet shaped with an artist’s eye. Here, scientists used the pre-storm conditions of an F4 tornado observed in South Dakota in 2003 to launch a simulation of a severe supercell storm, producing a powerful tornado and terabytes of data. The visualization follows an hour of its evolution: orange and blue streamtubes trace air rising and sinking, a swirling mass of red spheres marks the tornado as it forms, and tilting cones on the ground reveal the meeting of warm and cold air at its base. Throughout, Cox pursues the goal that has guided her for over thirty years: to bring data alive with both ‘artistic vitality and scientific accuracy.’
Artistic career: Donna Cox
Artistic practice and research
Donna Cox (USA, 1949) is an artist and pioneer of scientific visualization who has spent decades turning complex data into cinematic images. She coined the term ‘Renaissance Teams’ to describe collaborations between artists, scientists and technologists, and for many years directed the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois. Her team’s visualizations have reached millions of viewers through IMAX films, including the Academy Award-nominated Cosmic Voyage, as well as planetarium shows and television documentaries.