Bringing together pioneers in data science, arts and community engagement, the 2012 Eyeo Festival is sure to live up to its slogan: “Converge to Inspire.”  Speakers include innovators working at the intersections arts and data like Aaron Koblin, head of the Data Arts Team in Google’s Creative Lab, and Fernda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, who together lead Google’s “Big Picture” visualization group.  The 4-day festival is expected to have 500 attendees and takes place June 5^th – June 8^th in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Participants will attend panels, demos, interactive labs and keynotes at the Walker Art Center (the Festival Hub) and other venues throughout the city.

Aaron Koblin is known for work like, The Sheep Market and Ten Thousand Cents, which use community-generated data to explore creative ways of relating through technology.  Koblin’s workshop, JavaScript Tools for HTML 5 Artists, explains the Google Data Arts Team’s usage of dat.GUI for changing variables, three.js 3D engine and stats.js performance widget.  Koblin will also lead the Data Arts session, which reviews the Google Data Arts team’s current projects and libraries.

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Watternberg (founders of Flowing Media, Inc. and formerly of IBM’s visual communication lab) create eclectic visualization based artwork, which has shown at institutions like the Museum of Modern Art NY and London Institute of Contemporary Arts.  Viégas and Wattenberg’s session, Seeing Invisible Influences, will explore “how we use visualization to spark the joy of revelation–mapping the invisible forces that surround us, from social networks to the play of the wind.”

As the fields of data science and art continue to intersect, organizers believe events like Eyeo Festival can help us imagine new ways for harnessing big data and emerging technologies.  “Access to data and tools continues to enter new realms…it’s open access to oceans of digitized archives and more and more APIs.  What can we do with all this data? What can’t we do? Artists, designers and coders build and bend technology and give us a glimpse into what’s possible, into what’s next.”

Festival sponsors include Ford Foundation, Visualizing.org, O’Reilly and more.  For more information and to register visit: http://eyeofestival.com/.