Natalia Kiseleva
Climate Bracelet
This bracelet encodes data on global warming in the city of Arkhangelsk over the past few decades. Each pair of rows represents a year, and the color of the beads codes the temperature difference from a baseline value in the past. The darker and redder the beads, the more the temperature for that year deviates positively from the norm; the bluer the beads, the more they deviate negatively. In essence: red beads represent hot years, and blue beads represent cool years. This method, known as Warming Stripes, was popularized by Ed Hawkins. Since then, it has become popular among eco-activists and data visualizers to create such warming stripes from various materials, primarily knitting scarves!

This project was challenging but incredibly interesting! I had long wanted to try creating handmade data art, but knitting something seemed too difficult (beading turned out to be no easier...).
And then I had a brilliant idea—in my youth, I used to make friendship bracelets—nothing too complicated, so why not weave this material data art out of beads? (dramatic pause and suspenseful music in the background...)

And I did it... I might have gone a bit gray in the process... It was surprisingly difficult but incredibly interesting!

I'll share a bit about my experience below and include photos of the process!

I took climate data from Arkhangelsk and St. Petersburg and translated the climate changes over a hundred years into a special striped image. Then, through some serious ingenuity, I converted it into embroidery floss colors, then from one brand of floss to another, and finally into beads from one company and then to beads from another company. You can see the process in the picture!


And only after a month of all these calculations and conversions did I finally order the beads!

The easiest part was left - weaving! Everything was ready, the beads were purchased, and the loom was assembled. In any case, it was incredibly interesting, although challenges arose at every step! Here are some photos of the preparation process!
But the weaving turned out to be quite tricky. Overall, the process is easy and enjoyable, and I liked it a lot.

However, there are a few moments when you need to be extremely careful... Otherwise, everything is ruined!

So, this is the last decent photo of the bracelet before the thread ran out, and then it stopped fitting into the loom. These two challenging situations separately led to the breaking of the main fishing line. I spent an hour trying to revive this structure.

And I even succeeded, although it required a lot of extra fishing line!

After the project, I still have a lot of materials and calculations, tables and articles, so if someone wants to try to repeat this difficult (full of suffering and joy) experience, please follow the link below, I will record a short video course about it or conduct a workshop.

My Other Projects
D&D Community Data Portrait
Here are the data portraits of our local Dungeons & Dragons community, encoding players' preferences and experiences.
2024
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Diary of Emotions
The Emotion Diary is a project that combines data from two diaries - the Sketch Calendar and the Emotion Diary - for one month. I decided to overlay these two projects on each other - in one part encoding emotions with color, and in the other leaving sketches.
This way, even on the hardest day, there was something amusing.
2024
Check!
'Flowers and Figures' Community!
At 2024 I created data art community 'Flowers and Figures' and our first project was based on the dataset of group members. We altogether visualized the community's portrait using various methods.
Read more about our Data-art Community!
2024
Read!
Data badges 'Moms, Folder, and Kids Stuff
Created data portraits of moms from the local parenting community based on Kimley Scott's project.
2024
Check!
The Data Ink project
My new small challenge project.
As part of my practice, I decided to draw small graphic data-arts by hand on personal data.
I draw with a black fountain pen in a cute notebook.
Check!
My travels
In this project, I gathered my travels over many years. This project, resembling the music of the winds, is done on paper, but in the process, it's a tangible version.
2023
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Data-art: Mortality caused by road traffic injury
The theme of this data art is Mortality caused by road traffic injury. In the form of an ornate plant motif, data on deaths from road accidents in different European countries are encrypted, and other features of these countries are also hidden there. Details about the project can be found at the link!
2022
Read!
Data-art "Family tree. The Mezen folk painting"
The theme of this data art is my small family tree. Patterns and symbols were taken from the Northern folk painting - Mezen. Each element in this work represents one of the closest family members. For more information about the decryption and description of the work, follow the link!
2020
Read!
Friends
In this project, I gathered all my friends throughout my life up to 2020 and depicted them in these curls, trying to enrich the images with data about shared interests, frequency of communication, etc.
One of my first data arts.
2020
Check!

I love data art, I study this direction, collect a collection of world projects, and classify them. I host live streams on the topic of data art, where we analyze various interesting directions of data art with guests.

I teach courses on data art, have a Telegram channel on Data Art, and a data art practice group called 'Flowers and Figures'.

Drop by sometime! If you want to learn more about this direction, check out my articles and videos on data art:

Lectures and Workshops


I teach data visualization, dashboard design, data art, and working with data visualization tools (BI products) Power BI, and Tableau. I give lectures and conduct workshops.


I collaborate as a lecturer and trainer with:


  • A. Kolokolov Institute of Business Analytics (2019-...).
  • Data Visualization Society (2022-2023).
  • MSU Moscow State University (2022).
  • HSE Higher School of Economics (2022).
  • MGPU Moscow City Teacher Training University (2022).
  • EU SPb European University at Saint Petersburg (2022).
If you are interested in collaboration or need a personal consultation, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn, Telegram, or by email eolay@inbox.ru.
If you interested in these and my other projects - please subscribe to my page in social networks for regular updates! I'll be glad!
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