Bryan Christie: turning visualisation into art

There's a thin line between information design - infographics - and art. And the best of the former manage to cross over into the latter. So it is with the work of Bryan Christie , a New York-based designer who wowed the famously imperturbable audience at the Malofiej conference of infographic designers in Spain recently with the work behind this video. It was commissioned by National Geographic for this fascinating feature on the hand in its May edition. NG has kindly allowed us to embed the video here. Christie, who regularly produces visualisations for the New York Times, has made it his mission to portray the workings of the human body. To produce a video like this one is not simple: it involves recreating the human hand, often working in multiple angles at the same time, which is how all of these 3D images are created, such as the one below for Wired. The works are based on a combination of medical text books and MRI scans, modelled in a virtual 3D space. Says Christie The medium I work in is a new form of photography; it is both sculptural and photographic. I model the figures in digital 3D on the computer, then use a virtual camera within the computer to take a picture of the piece. There's an interesting process that occurs in that my work is sculptural and exists in virtual three-dimensional space yet in the end it is viewed in two dimensions much like a photograph. What I create exists as 1s and 0s And it's not a million miles from the hand above to works like this one. Bather from Bryan Christie on Vimeo . Is it information design? Who cares? The results are information - but they're beautiful too. More data Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian World government data • Search the world's government data with our gateway Development and aid data • Search the world's global development data with our gateway Can you do something with this data? • Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group • Contact us at [email protected] • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter • Like us on Facebook