Here's a patch-in-progress, now that I was successfully able to get my ultrasonic sensor readings to appear in the Max console. I'm also including a screen recording of the Max print feed, so you can see what's going on – I see that the console is breaking up the lines of data into smaller pieces (which I can imagine is simple enough to fix). For example, in Max/MSP, the word "distance" is broken up between several lines, and so are the numerical figures. Here is an example of how the same data shows up in the Arduino serial plotter. Just a note, I have included the word "distance" to also be printed, just to reduce confusion about values.
15:41:05.887 -> Distance: 68.54
15:41:05.958 -> Distance: 68.54
15:41:06.063 -> Distance: 50.18
15:41:06.171 -> Distance: 50.17
15:41:06.278 -> Distance: 50.98
15:41:06.387 -> Distance: 51.39
15:41:06.459 -> Distance: 51.37
15:41:06.563 -> Distance: 50.93
15:41:06.667 -> Distance: 50.52
15:41:06.769 -> Distance: 50.52
Now that I'm thinking more of the aesthetic exploration, I would be interested to have this data converted into a digital drawing that changes over time, so I suppose that would be a video. I'm particularly interested in how a drawn line in digital space can be infinitely thin (unlike a pencil line, which is defined by the material), and so I could imagine playing with what are known as "space-filling curves" that approach infinity – for example, Peano curves or Hilbert curves. Here's the wikipedia page for an overview of what's behind them: