Jen Ray and Jason Forrest in conversation with Anna-Sophie Jürgens | Section: Visual Science Storytelling, Sequential Art & Illustrated Science Communication: Introducing a New Series
Abstract: What happens when data leaves reports, dashboards and institutional settings and enters the streets, subway stations and everyday spaces of civic life? In this conversation, artists and designers Jen Ray and Jason Forrest (Data Vandals) discuss a practice and artistic concept that transforms data into public encounters – inviting people to touch, question, interpret and collectively remake information rather than consume it. Drawing on projects such as LA on the Move and the Data Vandals Newsstand, Ray and Forrest reflect on research, visual storytelling, participation and the relationship between data and lived experience. Situated at the intersection of art, data visualisation and civic participation, their practice explores how information can be transformed into a social and visual experience. Through drawings, installations, kiosks, surveys and public encounters, Data Vandals create spaces in which data becomes a catalyst for conversation, storytelling and collective reflection. The interview offers insight into the artistic ideas, methods and ambitions that shape their distinctive approach to working with information in public life.
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Jen Ray and Jason Forrest – the Data Vandals – it is a real pleasure to welcome you to the online journal w/k! Across subway platforms, street corners and makeshift kiosks that resemble both newsstands and speculative laboratories, you invite passers-by into a different relationship with information – one where scientific data is not simply read, but handled, discussed and collectively remade. In line with your slogan, “We transform data into experiences that invite curiosity and conversations”, you treat data not as a static representation of the world, but as a material for public encounter and visual engagement. In doing so, your work shifts attention toward its social and situated life – something to be touched, contested, and collectively narrated in the everyday spaces where civic life actually unfolds. This sits at the heart of our series on creative science communication, which explores how visual culture around and about science, science storytelling and creative knowledge infrastructures make science and data publicly meaningful, embodied and emotionally legible. We are very much looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the creative and artistic concepts behind your practice, and on its wider potential as a form of science communication and public engagement.
Data Vandals: Great to be here!
Before we dive into your collaborative work as Data Vandals, could you both introduce yourselves to our readers – perhaps through the lens of your individual practices: Jen, your richly layered worlds of feminist science fiction, performative drawing and speculative storytelling; and Jason, your work at the intersection of data visualisation, design leadership and public-facing information cultures that turn complex systems into shared visual narratives?
Jen: I come from drawing and performance. For years, I was making large-scale feminist works on paper, mostly exhibiting my artwork in museums and galleries. I still work on my own artwork in addition to Data Vandals work.
Jason: I wear a bunch of hats and most of them involve data visualisation in one way or another. I have an agency (the Jason Forrest Agency, JFA) that specialises in full-stack software development, I’m the chair of a new Master’s program at the School of Visual Art (SVA) for Data Visualisation & Communication, and then I’m ½ of Data Vandals! Before all of this, I was the editor-in-chief of Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualisation Society.
Data Vandals emerged over a two-year period, mainly to give ourselves time to find our voice and learn how to work with each other. Our work exists very much as a public experiment, with each project informing the next.
I recently had the chance to see your work on wild animals passing through Los Angeles at Union Station, and was completely mesmerised – not only by its visual appeal, but also by the inventive and often humorous ways ecological information was presented. Even calls to action around wildlife protection were subtly woven into your panels. (A short interview about this exhibition is available via LA on the Move) Overall, your science-informed visual work unfolds in subway platforms, newsstands, mobile kiosks and exhibition-as-urban-intervention formats. Rather than producing gallery-bound illustration, it embeds visual culture directly within civic infrastructure – and this is a very deliberate choice. What first drew you to exploring where research and science ‘live’ culturally, and to questioning how those sites might be challenged or expanded?
We have been involved in the art world for years, but were always interested in talking to a bigger, more general audience. Like, only an arts audience goes to a museum, as opposed to a train station. We created a project for London Data Week where we took a funny 3-wheeled vehicle and drove it around London surveying people in 6 different neighbourhoods. What we took away from the experience was talking to literally anyone who walked by on the street. Many of them had very different feelings about technology and several older people shared that they were distrustful of the concept of ‘data’. To them, data was something that impacted their lives in a way that left them powerless. In many ways, this speaks to the digital divide; that only certain types of people have digital access. As Data Vandals evolved, we wanted to find ways to put our work in highly public areas, so it naturally lends itself to a placement as public art. After the project in London, we had a few conversations with the Greater London Authority and then the Analytics team in NYC. Without knowing it, we had found a major overlap with civic communications.
Now that we’ve had some public projects installed in high-traffic areas, our work is changing to find ways to have ‘longer’ conversations and interactions with bigger communities. As you mentioned, this can best be seen in the Data Vandals Newsstand that opened on a busy NYC Subway platform. It’s about as public as can be, serving the fullest range of New Yorkers. While our work is focused on using data as a way to build community and raise awareness, we wouldn’t consider our work specifically focused on science. If anything, we are open to exploring people’s lived experiences in comparison to science.
While we have a certain aptitude for distilling complex ideas, we think it’s closer to art than science. Maybe because of this, labelling our work has been difficult. We have been defining our work as Data-art, but it could also be seen as Social Sculpture, as defined by Josef Beuys. Lastly, and maybe more practically, we also believe that we have an obligation to participate in civic life to make things interesting for our neighbours and friends. We want to offer interesting and surprising ideas for people to react to.
Jen, in a recent interview you said, “what we always do, is begin with research”. Could you unpack that for our readers? What kinds of research do you primarily engage with in your practice, and which scientific themes or questions are you particularly drawn to?
Jen: Jason and I work differently. He dives in and works very quickly. He’s always multitasking. I like to think about things for a bit and then let my response form as I learn more about the subject. I love to learn about the history of a subject. For instance, for our LA project, researching the earliest beginnings of Los Angeles was exciting to me. And I’m inspired by historical documents and images. Over the years, we have learned to collaborate on shared research and we usually combine different aspects of the research as we design and draw out the project.
From visual art and storytelling to civic experience
Across our previously published articles on pop-up books, real-life science superheroes and visual storytelling, this w/k series consistently gravitates toward exploring science as visual narrative; as playful or unexpected media formats; as public-facing translation of expertise; and as materiality – paper, objects, installation and interaction. In short, it approaches science communication as cultural imagination rather than information ‘delivery’ or dissemination. Data Vandals seem to extend this trajectory in a further direction, creating – and embodying – participatory data storytelling as a civic art practice. How do you think about your work as a civic art practice, and what conditions or influences shaped the emergence of your signature visual style?
Yes! This is exactly how we’ve been thinking about our work!
The form and technique of our work has absolutely evolved as a direct response to creating attractive work that creates empathy with the subject. We learned long ago that people are only really motivated when they can see themselves in the data. From that point on, we have always been looking for ways to connect people so that they can literally see themselves in the data and then extend that empathy to the world around them. Over the past year, our work has revolved around this mantra: “How do you have a conversation with a city?” What we hope to prove with our Newsstand project is that we can create a community of people based on place and commonality by conducting surveys that will build on each other over a year’s time. The ‘conversation’ is a year-long residency in the city, and the surveys create a natural ebb and flow of the dialogue. This has been the main reason why our work feels relatively handmade and analogue. In many ways, our work is digital and increasingly involves AI tools, but the aesthetics of our work remain hand-made, irregular, and utterly human by design.
When you work with data (or creatively vandalise it), what are you trying to make visible: the information itself or the relationship people have to it? And how do you situate your art – do you think of it as illustration, design or something closer to performance?
We mainly focus on the relationship between our audience and the data. Yes, we LOVE to get deep in the data, but getting people to care is the biggest part of our effort. So, the physical aspect of our work is what we spend our time on, but the impact we create in the lives of our audience is what we’re really focused on. For example, we recently were in Los Angeles and unexpectedly met a fan of our work. They pulled out their phone and showed us photos from four months earlier – the work had been alive in their minds ever since.
The Newsstand can feel performative some days when we explain the same things over and over, but we’re more interested in being active participants with the public rather than set apart as something special. This level of ‘real life’ is probably one of the most interesting aspects of our work. This is what we meant by ‘social sculpture’: that our social interactions are ultimately our medium and that society itself is the sculpture.
This is a rather open question, but can data ever be understood without being experienced?
That’s the magic of Data Visualisation, right? There’s no way anyone can understand what the 7,400 miles of sewer pipes in NYC mean, but if you make a chart that displays this as a round trip from New York to Tokyo, then it helps you understand just how far that is. There’s nothing physical about it – but it is framed in a way that speaks to your lived experience.
Do your installations (for example, the subway “newsstand as gallery”) function as a kind of fictional infrastructure – one that operates as if data itself were conversational?
Yes, we are moving away from ‘data as fact’ to ‘data as observation’ because people’s lived experience may not match the insights derived from the collected data. While we deeply believe in the factual nature of collected data, we also know that many (most?) data sources can be considered vague in terms of its collection, analysis and documentation, so we don’t believe that data alone can represent ‘the truth’. While we’re not arguing about the factual nature of the work, we prefer to discuss how this can be viewed by different perceptions.
More broadly, why does it matter that your work lives in subway stations and streets rather than galleries? And what changes when science-based data is encountered in transit?
We’re not opposed to being in a gallery, but we also want our work to live in public areas so that more people can experience it. We never tried to focus our work on transportation but were just thinking about common areas where people would go and how we might make it interesting for them. We aren’t that focused on science, but really just in trying to get people to engage with each other. In doing this work, we have come to learn that many people do not want to engage with concepts like ‘data’ or ‘science’ but would gladly talk about animals, or society or even economics – just not under those terms. That’s partially why we try to put as much focus on the interaction with subject matter and less about sloganeering.
When data becomes a street performer
What changes in the meaning of scientific data when it moves from being read to being actively participated in?
This is where things get interesting! When an audience participates in an exhibition – or even a conversation – it creates a link to the subject, and the person has to engage. They get invested in the conversation, and to participate, they start to have a perspective. This is how the data moves from being a talking point, to something that lives on in a conversation.
You don’t just visualise data – you stage it across subway kiosks as “living datasets”, through sticker votes, story slips, drawings and the public co-authorship of data itself. We would be very interested to hear your thoughts on what happens when illustration stops representing science and starts producing it: what kinds of knowledge emerge from this?
With “The Great London Survey”, we realised that collecting the data and discussing it with people on the street was actually more important than the analysis of the data. It became a much better way to understand the desires, emotions, and sympathies behind the data, rather than just a quantification. This is also where the subject matter becomes more interesting and contextualised than just counting someone’s ‘vote’ – because they will tell you why they feel a certain way. The data stops becoming a number and starts becoming someone’s story. Collecting the stories becomes something more nuanced than just the raw numbers.
There seems to be an authority shift in your approach to science communication, moving it away from expert systems toward more distributed forms of knowledge. Would you say that, in your work, science becomes something more ‘negotiated’? What does scientific authority look like when it becomes editable by the public?
We think ‘authority’ is what we’re ultimately discussing. We know we get numbers wrong sometimes or that someone else may have a different data perspective – and that’s OK. Our media collectively tells us that the world is broken into these camps with science on one side and belief on the other, but the reality is that humans are messy, and our feelings and opinions drive much of what we believe, not just blindly accepting the data. In many ways, our over-politicised world is pushing each of us to have lots of hard opinions, but ultimately, it’s a world of grey areas.
Is participation itself becoming a visual medium?
Many of our surveys take the form of posters where the audience can place a sticker to share their opinion; and with this, we see a few trends. The first responses tend to place the stickers more cleanly on the posters. But at a certain point, the stickers start overlapping and then the data starts to take a more organic form. Then the real magic happens: as the stickers build up, people will start to collectively analyse the data on the posters and thevisible trends in the data become a second layer of conversation – an evaluation of the subject matter and a discussion of different perspectives.
What do you envision the future of Data Vandals – if you could take on a dream project with unlimited resources, what would that look like?
We would love to have a project that brings a lot of people together to contribute their opinions to large-scale data sets and activities. We picture it as a sort-of game where people from disparate backgrounds could help each other achieve a common goal. We don’t think it would cost too much, but we would need a lot of enthusiastic helpers. Beyond this, we would love to create a vehicle that drove around and discussed data and we would also love to create some large-scale murals.
Thank you for this wonderful conversation!
References
“LA on the move” official website.
Title image: Data Vandals, “Animal Species At Risk In California”, from the exhibition “LA on the Move” Union Station, Waiting Room Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.
How to cite this article
Jen Ray, Jason Forrest & Anna-Sophie Jürgens (2026): Data Vandals: Art and the Civic Life of Scientific Knowledge. w/k–Between Science & Art Journal. https://doi.org/10.55597/e10416
