"Kenneth Cukier, data editor at The Economist, thinks we are “at the outset of a new movement in art that is built around data.” Digital information is now doubling every two years, he says, so it’s natural for artists to gravitate toward using data as a medium. Antonelli, the MoMA curator, sees it as a case of “people needing to make sense of data.” This accounts for why, she says, data viz has become “an established form of design and an absolutely important one.” But only in the past ten years, in the estimation of Shenai’s tutor, Karin von Ompteda; in this time the use of data visualisation in art and design has “exploded,” she says. And this “big data” revolution is already changing the way new programmes like IED (in its second year) are structured. “The training of the artist is changing,” says von Ompteda. “Programming is part of the curriculum now. Working with spreadsheets and numbers and statistics—that’s a huge shift.” The Masters in Art and Science at Central St Martins, a leading art school in London, uses similar techniques. Von Ompteda says that including some data techniques in the art curriculum is now considered “mainstream” among universities worldwide."