2018 Data61 summer scholars data-driven art prize

The goal of the summer scholar coding activity is to write software to produce an artwork from one or more datasets.

What is a data-driven artwork?

Art that's created using data. We encourage you to use the data to produce something beautiful or challenging: a picture, an animation, a piece of music, a poem, a story, a sculpture, or something else! The theme of the competition this year is "Open Data".

How does the competition work?

Each artwork should be generated from one or more datasets, using software written during the hackathon (not beforehand). This year's theme is "Open Data". The data should be sourced using Data61's open data discovery platform - search.data.gov.au. It catalogs the majority of Australia's publically available government datasets. You can also incorporate additional datasets discovered elsewhere on the web to enhance your submission, if necessary. We strongly suggest you download your data beforehand. Team's will have 4 hours on Thursday (9:30 - 13:30) to produce the artwork but it's worth having a vision and the relevant datasets ready to go before 9:30 am.

Teams

We recommend forming teams of 3-4, with 5 the absolute maximum. We've created a channel on the data61 slack (data61.slack.com) to help find team-mates. The channel is #scholarhack2018.

Presentations

At the end of the hackathon each team will present their artwork, briefly describing the data they used and how it was made. Each team will be alloted 1 minute to explain and demonstrate their artwork to the judges.

Prizes

The current prize categories may include the following (though they may also change on the day depending on the volume of submissions)

Artwork with the most insight into the data
Most original data-driven artwork
Best data-driven visual artwork
Best data-driven audio artwork
Best data-driven text artwork
Best data-driven dynamic artwork (video or performance)

What should I bring?

MAKE SURE YOU DOWNLOAD YOUR DATA BEFORE YOU ARRIVE!!!

Bring along laptops with your development environment already set up. Make sure you have the data you intend to use already downloaded. The artworks will be presented to the judges so make sure it is possible to put them on a projector or play them through a speaker etc.