Physical representation of data has more than 7000 years tradition: The Sumerians used pieces of clay to represent units of measure;native Micronesians built physical visualizations that showed ocean swell patterns to facilitate canoe navigation. See an interesting chronological list of physical visualizations and related artifacts on http://dataphys.org/list/ maintained by Pierre Dragicevic and Yvonne Jansen.
Art often paves the way for industrial use and 3D printing can recharge the cultural skills to create tangible “data landscapes”. Examples: The 3D datasculpture from a seismogram of an earthquake in Japan (by Luke Jerram; Tate Modern/ London); Loren Madsen who visualized the US Defense Budget with a carved wooden sculpture; Davide Quaola invented the virtual deconstruction of Michelangelo sculptures and their interpretation on a Voxeljet 3D printer (exhibited at the Ars Electronica 2014/Linz, Austria).
With tangible models “beyond Excel” MeliesArt aims to occupy an offset to a trend that has been described during the Düsseldorf Art Exhibition " Quadrennial 2014" as follows: "Just as in today's ramified information society is also in media art, an increasing loss to corporeal substance to watch ".Tangible dataSculptures stimulate emotional behaviour (“flying with my eyes thru dataspace/ climbing investment hurdles by touching the model walls, feeling difficult ground when my fingertips touch rough model surface”) and therefore apparently can be more efficiently memorized.