"VISUALIZING LAKE ERIE: WHERE ART & DATA MEET"

Dr. Margaret E. Bacon Student Gallery; Buffalo State University

May 3rd - May 9th, 2026

Jamey Alea, Paige Ciezki, Milk Kempski, Dave Mawer, Katie Witnauer

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Beginning in September 2025, students and faculty from the Buffalo State Art Education department worked with staff from Buffalo State's Great Lakes Center to explore data collected by the Center's seasonal research buoy on Lake Erie. Located two nautical miles south-southwest of Buffalo, New York, in the Eastern Basin of Lake Erie, the buoy collects real time information about wind, water, and wave conditions.

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The works in this exhibition translate that environmental data into different visual and material forms. A macrame piece interprets wind speed, wind direction, and wave height during a July 2025 seiche event. Software visualizations created in p5.js depict lake temperature stratification and changing wind and wave conditions. Pen plotter works transform photographs from Lake Erie into machine-drawn marks based on pixel readings.

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Together, these works explore Lake Erie as a changing environmental system while emphasizing the role of artistic interpretation in helping us notice patterns and events that might otherwise remain abstract. Across these projects, data becomes both evidence and material, shaping the form of each work while remaining connected to observed conditions on the lake.