Here is a great, albeit hokey, animation demonstrating the architecture of Bach’s Crab Cannon. How does one find ways to demonstrate structure that are both elucidating and graphically pleasing? Where this video is amazingly successful is in that it gives a very simple visual model which clearly shows the mind-blowing complexity of Bach’s composition in such a fashion that anyone with little or no musical knowledge can see, understand, and appreciate.

Though how can we convey information like this but perhaps use more natural graphic elements and textures to put it together visually?

Check out this beautiful short clip of Edward Tufte showing how he uses high definition video of different wavefields along with 3-D animation and motion graphics to create visually stunning representations of information.

Here’s another lovely music visualization by The Music Animation Machine, you may have come across some of these, they’ve been popping up more and more and are quite beautiful. However there’s still something lacking for me, something natural. They show the music “working” but they still don’t really show how it works.

And here’s a clip from a 3-2-1 Contact episode featuring Suzanne Ciani. I love this clip. This is completely different in that its PEOPLE discussing and explaining. There is a very specific, odd and tender quality to this clip; the interaction between the two girls is borderline erotic.

(embedding is “disabled” for this clip so please click HERE to watch.)

All of these clips look to elucidate information in different ways. There is so much stunning and incredible work happening with data right now — what I am interested in is a kind of cross between data visualization and narrative cinematic story-telling.

Here’s one more clip of a few different wonderful artists working with data and generative art:

I am hoping this post starts a bit of a conversation. Please do comment with any thoughts, clips, or images.