Data Through Design Projects (2018–Present)

NEW YORK ALIVE!

Join artist Jen Ray and data designer Jason Forrest as they present a not-entirely-serious exploration of the urges, needs, and desires of New York City residents – both officially in the data, as well as through informal survey results. Inspired by historic influences such as Otto & Marie Neurath Isotype designs and the Triadic Ballet of the Bauhaus, this performance will be a celebration of the city, echoing the interests that make our shared culture so unique. By incorporating movement, props, pictorial statistics, music, megaphones, and good humor we guarantee you've never seen data presented in this way before!

Jen Ray,Jason Forrest

Ground Truth, IRL

2022

Love Your Local Business List [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/5694-9szk], Urban Park Ranger Animal Condition Response [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/fuhs-xmg2], 311 Service Requests from 2020 to Present [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/erm2-nwe9], Rodent Inspection [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/p937-wjvj]

New York City Seeks Talented Individuals to Compose Haikus

What are the duties of New York City's civil servants?
The New York City government employs almost 400,000 people. From performing manual labor and infrastructure maintenance to creating innovative methods for reducing waste, homelessness and crime, civil servants keep this city running. Bringing to light the work government employees do for all of us, this piece uses the current NYC government job descriptions to algorithmically generate haikus. Lured by their simplicity and beauty, the artist chose the conventional haiku form, which is traditionally used to ponder the wonder of nature, as an unconventional platform for his subject. Through this whimsical piece, labor and bureaucracy are elevated to poetry.

Jeremy Neiman

8 Questions for the City

2018

Jobs NYC Postings [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/kpav-sd4t]

NYC Clock

Clock time is not an absolute truth but a cultural artifact. The project asks what it would mean to create our own clock, utilizing data from something we care about as a time-giver. 
In a city like NYC, where values such as "Mind your own business" and "Time is money" dominate, we propose a speculative visualization and installation inspired by the designer’s experiences in crisis as a means to challenge this perception. The project utilizes data on the number of people seeking help (including 911 End-to-End, NYPD Calls for Service, 311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present, 311 Call Center Inquiry), alongside other installation clocks like a nature clock (sunset-sunrise data), a business clock (UTC time), and a Myself clock (sleep and awake data). As a prototype, this clock offers multiple avenues for usage and interpretation, envisioning future clocks that could connect to various data sources through open APIs.

Saralee Sittigaroon,Ziyu Zhang

Aftermath

2024

911 End-to-End Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/t7p9-n9dy], NYPD Calls for Service (Year to Date) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/n2zq-pubd], 311 Service Requests from 2020 to Present [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/erm2-nwe9]

NYC Trees Soundscape

NYC Trees Soundscapes is a data sonification project based on NYC’s urban forest and architecture. The project reimagines routes through the city as tracks on a musical sequencer, with the city’s trees and urban elements (e.g. subway stops, wifi access points) as the notation instruments on these tracks. Using an interactive map displayed on a supersized touch screen, audience members are immersed in a synesthetic experience of the once-familiar landscape.

Itay Niv,Aidan Nelson

NaN - Not a Number

2019

2015 Street Tree Census - Tree Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/uvpi-gqnh], NYC Wi-Fi Hotspot Locations [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/yjub-udmw], Public Recycling Bins [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/sxx4-xhzg], DSNY Litter Basket Inventory [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/8znf-7b2c]

Our Neighbors: Urban Animals of New York

Our Neighbors: Urban Animals of New York highlights the wide variety of animals that live in New York City. The piece is about cohabitation, shared resources, and diverse landscapes. The design utilizes natural materials gathered from the many NYC parks that animals call home, including things such as leaves, branches, pinecones, rocks, dirt, and other organic matter. In most data sets, we don’t get a tangible sense of what is behind the data, but nature is something that provides us with a very sensory experience. In this case, it is not only the animals themselves that we may interact with, but perhaps more often the natural habitats we all share. This piece is an experiment in playing with spatialization of data as the colors of the threads and placement of the globes (within the frame) corresponds to data points collected about where animals live, their health, and the seasons that shape our experience of the outside world. The accompanying posters provide a more concrete visualization of the Urban Park Ranger Animal Condition Response Data Set and offer a key to read the representations that are built into the sculpture. This piece helps people to think about all the nonhuman animals that share urban space and its many landscapes with us.

Nancy Smith

Ground Truth, IRL

2022

Urban Park Ranger Animal Condition Response [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/fuhs-xmg2]

Parcel ATM

Though often invisible, tax lots are an essential part of the financial machinery of cities – and a contested space. Parcel ATM is an automated telecommunications device built to inspect this machinery, allowing you to search through 21 years of NYC tax lot data. While these data catalog tax lots in technical terms (LandUse, BldgClass, ZoneDist, ResFAR, OwnerName, etc.), they reveal much more, telling the regulatory, socioeconomic, and built history of New York City. Dive in, "Visit the Parcel ATM at parcels.nyc".

Raphaël Laude

Aftermath

2024

Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output - Map (MapPLUTO) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/f888-ni5f]

MapPLUTO (https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/resources/datasets/mappluto-pluto-change)

Parks x Needle

Parks x Needle is a tactile visualization of the NYC Park’s Forever Wild’s ecologically important natural resources. There are four key components in producing this park visualization: NYC Parks for providing the shapes of the wildlife zones, a visual effects software (Houdini) for procedurally generating the stitches and paths, a tufting gun mounted robot arm to stitch based on a given path, and the artists’ park excursions to find the yarn’s color palette that reflects their experience of the NYC parks in all five boroughs. This project hopes to provide a fun, novel, and cozy experience for the audience to interact with the expansive parks at an intimate scale as well as spark a sense of exploration and play.

Sally Kong,Owen Trueblood

Ground Truth, IRL

2022

NYC Parks Forever Wild [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/48va-85tp]

Plants: Informational Entities Over Time

In 2017, a large white oak believed to be over 200 years old—affectionately known as the Granny Oak—fell in Pelham Bay Park. In the clearing where the oak once stood, trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants have responded to the hole left in the canopy. Multiflora rosa, an invasive species, has since taken over the site making native species few and far between. This installation makes visible years of landscape change in Pelham Bay Park using the entitation maps originally piloted in the park in 1986 to demonstrate the informational potential of plants as a marker of time, and by extension, political investment. Focusing on entitation unit 1001 where the Granny Oak stood, the project develops a series of high-fidelity botanical models of the 18 plants listed in the catalogue to depict what it looked like at the time of a 2007 site survey. Intermixed with LIDAR data, the animations attempt to reconstruct the plant community based on these data sources. Plants are presented here as a living sensors or data points, as records for the aftermath of ecological and political change in the city.

Sonia Sobrino Ralston

Aftermath

2024

Entitation Parsed Species [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/v959-5k2w], Topobathymetric LiDAR Data (2017) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/7sc8-jtbz]

Temporal Views of the Bike Lane

There are more people than ever in New York City’s bike lanes and the city is quick to claim the crown, citing some 300 miles of lanes laid in the last five years alone. But the stats also tell us this: nearly 10,000 complaints oof a blocked bike lane, but only 57 have been resolved in a summons, a clear indication that 311 complaints are rarely enforced.
These numbers have failed to characterize the experience of sharing those lanes with everyone else. Think about all those near-misses as you swerve out to avoid a delivery truck or a ride-share, or maybe it’s a re-route into traffic thanks to a construction project. In a city where at least 45,000 residents cycle to work, a figure that’s two times more than any other city in the US, this is a problem.

Crystal Penalosa,Melissa De La Cruz

NaN - Not a Number

2019

Parking Violations Issued - Fiscal Year 2018 [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/a5td-mswe], 311 Service Requests From 2018 [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/jqp2-bjda], New York City Bike Routes (Map) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/9e2b-mctv]

Pockets of Information:
Community Care in a Speculative New York

Pocket of Information explores how a community-oriented information sharing model could take place in the aftermath of severe climate change in New York City. It takes a solarpunk approach to imagining our relationship to the land and each other. Taking inspiration from WWII bomber jackets, which were lined with maps to assist pilots in navigation if their planes went down, it is a garment-based resource map. Instead of a bomber jacket, it is a chore coat, a garment associated with care and maintenance and not war and colonialism, and instead of having the map on the lining, which only benefits the wearer, the map is on the exterior of the jacket so others can view and benefit from the information.

Claudia Berger,Gabriella Evergreen

Aftermath

2024

Borough Boundaries [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/gthc-hcne], Parks Properties [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/enfh-gkve], Sea Level Rise Maps (2050s 100-year Floodplain) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/hbw8-2bah], GreenThumb Garden Info [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/p78i-pat6], GreenThumb Site Visits [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/xqbk-beh5], New York City Bike Routes [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/mzxg-pwib]

Rat Revolution

Rat Revolution chronicles rat sightings in New York City from 2010 to 2023. Crafted with acrylic, light bulbs, and translucent paper, the 4-foot tornado-esque lantern represents a 3D polar plot. Acrylic rings denote months, led light colors signify temperatures, and the radius mirrors rat sightings. Viewers navigate freely, discovering details like heightened summer rat sightings and yearly surges. The bulbs and rat shadows guide the audience on a journey through the dataset from 2010 to 2023, and the aesthetic brilliance juxtaposed with the hidden nature of rats encourages contemplation on the complex relationship between humanity and these elusive creatures.

Danny Yang,Lesley Huang,Pia Bocanegra,Linda Yang

Aftermath

2024

311 Service Requests from 2020 to Present [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/erm2-nwe9]

https://www.weather.gov/media/okx/Climate/CentralPark/monthlyannualtemp.pdf

Rezoning: at What Cost?

Gowanus, Brooklyn has undergone massive changes due to the neighborhood rezoning that was approved in November 2021. Public policy is often hard to decipher and sometimes hidden from the people that it impacts the most. Rezoning: At What Cost? embeds previously indigestible data into physical form while providing spatial context to understand the data’s implications. By inviting users to engage with a physicalization of the data, this project builds a connection between people and policy.
The map of Gowanus is a future snapshot of all buildings currently permitted for construction since the rezoning. Each residential building is a combination of colored acrylic floors depicting the percentages of market rate and affordable housing. The audience can play with the data by taking off floors of buildings and rearranging them. An accompanying zine that provides more context and doubles as a worksheet to see how they do or do not fit into the NYC affordable housing system.

Tatiana Lahera Kalainoff

Aftermath

2024

Housing Database [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/6umk-irkx], Affordable Housing Production by Building [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/hg8x-zxpr]

Route “optimization” through our digital footprint

This installation creates a near-future narrative of mapping software and transportation route generation that is optimized to an individual’s digital profile.  Through this physical display, viewers will examine and contemplate the meaning, and possible outcomes, of society’s increasing dependence upon map routing, especially with the advent of self-driving vehicles.  Will routes be altered for particular individuals after algorithmically assessing their digital profiles and demographics? Will people with frequent coffee purchases in their footprint be driven by a Starbucks as a form of advertising?  Will Sephora pay to have women of higher incomes drive by their physical location? How will this new form of advertising and capitalism further stratify society? This installation considers how our physical location will be directed by our digital self, with the conversation and conclusions regarding gender, race, socioeconomics, interests, education, etc. left to the viewer.

Nat Quinn

Digital Twin

2020

Shadow Tag

‘Shadow Tag’ is a new experimental video exploring the unseen in the OpenCity data –  using a layered technique to search for traces of children, who are underrepresented in the metrics but always present, alongside impactful environmental factors. Visualizing signal extraction through hand-drawn animation, charts, and maps, the video presents an abstracted narrative that explores the concept of observability –and its twin controllability– through the open-structure of play.  Animations, created using chalk erasure and stop motion, occur directly on the street; data is redrawn within children’s environments, offering affordances for free play and adaptation.  The atmospheric soundtrack is initially generated by TwoTone data but then layered and looped, a connected distortion reflecting the resilient joy of ‘Shadow Tag.’

Cindy Stockton Moore,Rachel Blake,John Stockton,Hoang Pham,Rachel Wetzel

Ground Truth

2021

Directory of Playgrounds [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/59gn-q4ai], ARCHIVE - Schoolyards To Playgrounds [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/urxm-vzzk], Parks Closure Status Due to COVID-19: Playgrounds [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/a4qt-mpr5], "Kids In Motion" Playground Programming: 2016 to 2021 [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/8p6c-94pc], Dedicated Children's Areas (DCAs) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/j55h-3upk], Walk-to-a-Park Service area [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/5vb5-y6cv], NYPD Complaint Map (Year to Date) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/2fra-mtpn], Parks Inspection Program – Inspections [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/yg3y-7juh], Daily Tasks Park Cleaning Records [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/kwte-dppd], Children Under 6 yrs with Elevated Blood Lead Levels (BLL) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/tnry-kwh5], DOHMH Dog Bite Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/rsgh-akpg]

Tapestreet: The Fabric of NYC

‘Tapestreet’ is a musically and digitally woven tapestry collection representing the fabric of New York City. Each tapestry reflects the story behind a street or a neighborhood of the city. By leveraging the relationship between weaving, computation, text, and music theory, NYC streets and neighborhoods are visualized into aural and textural tapestries. Viewers are invited to weave their own stories around NYC neighborhoods, contribute their narratives to the collection, and take a piece home.‘Tapestreet’ is a musically and digitally woven tapestry collection representing the fabric of New York City. Each tapestry reflects the story behind a street or a neighborhood of the city. By leveraging the relationship between weaving, computation, text, and music theory, NYC streets and neighborhoods are visualized into aural and textural tapestries. Viewers are invited to weave their own stories around NYC neighborhoods, contribute their narratives to the collection, and take a piece home.

Nishra Ranpura

Corpus: Bodies of Data

2025

NYC Honorary Street Names Map (Intersection) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/ig76-wwag], NYC Honorary Street Names Map (Street Line) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/xesp-yqsx], Street Name Dictionary [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/w4v2-rv6b], Neighborhood Names GIS [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/99bc-9p23]

Shadow Tag

‘Shadow Tag’ is a new experimental video exploring the unseen in the OpenCity data – using a layered technique to search for traces of children, who are underrepresented in the metrics but always present, alongside impactful environmental factors. Visualizing signal extraction through hand-drawn animation, charts, and maps, the video presents an abstracted narrative that explores the concept of observability –and its twin controllability– through the open-structure of play. Animations, created using chalk erasure and stop motion, occur directly on the street; data is redrawn within children’s environments, offering affordances for free play and adaptation. The atmospheric soundtrack is initially generated by TwoTone data but then layered and looped, a connected distortion reflecting the resilient joy of ‘Shadow Tag.’

Cindy Stockton Moore,Rachel Blake,John Stockton,Hoang Pham,Rachel Wetzel

Ground Truth, IRL

2022

Directory of Playgrounds [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/59gn-q4ai], ARCHIVE - Schoolyards To Playgrounds [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/urxm-vzzk], Parks Closure Status Due to COVID-19: Playgrounds [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/a4qt-mpr5], "Kids In Motion" Playground Programming: 2016 to 2021 [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/8p6c-94pc], Dedicated Children's Areas (DCAs) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/j55h-3upk], Walk-to-a-Park Service area [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/5vb5-y6cv], NYPD Complaint Map (Year to Date) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/2fra-mtpn], Parks Inspection Program – Inspections [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/yg3y-7juh], Daily Tasks Park Cleaning Records [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/kwte-dppd], Children Under 6 yrs with Elevated Blood Lead Levels (BLL) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/tnry-kwh5], DOHMH Dog Bite Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/rsgh-akpg]

Slow Down

Do you feel anxious and unsafe crossing the streets of New York City? How many times have you turned your bike into a puddle to avoid pedestrians? Are you constantly on high alert on the road to avoid bikers, pedestrians, or other drivers while driving? Pedestrians, bikers and drivers are stressed on the busy road. Are we safe from traffic accidents?
Slow Down is an art installation that visualizes 8 years of traffic crash fatalities in New York City from 2010 to 2017 on fluorescent and transparent acrylic panels. Transparency of the material allows to view the accumulation of data through layers as well as yearly data on each from any direction and informs that more than thousands of lives have been taken away from traffic crash over the past 8 years. Streets are the largest and busiest infrastructure of New York City. Based on personal experience, walking the crowded and busy New York City streets occupied by pedestrians, bike riders, and cars may cause anxiety and fear. Evidently, NYC Open Data confirms fatalities and injuries by traffic crash occur everyday and with more than 200 fatalities and 50,000 injuries total every year. Slow Down aims to bring awareness to this public infrastructure and transportation safety issue and hopes to reduce accidents by slowing down the pace and making safer choices. This Installation is also dedicated as a memorial piece to those thousand of lives lost and their families.

Ellen Oh

8 Questions for the City

2018

VZV Vision Zero View Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/v7f4-yzyg]

Soil on the Move

My ongoing representation research thread develops novel soft representation methods through textiles that I call Ecological Communication Devices. Mapping natural systems through textiles creates a haptic artifact at scale that is responsive to water, material, and pressure. It also mimics weathering and aging that occurs in landscapes. Through this research, I am exploring tools to develop environmental literacy and understanding of the significant opportunity to teach through touch. Building on this methodology, Soil on the Move will be a representation project that maps dynamic and soft ecological systems. In this project I will be mapping the aftermath of soil movement and remediation, in contrast with where New Yorkers live and work. Anchored by the data from the NYC Clean Soil Bank, this textile will map where nature moves in the city, and what neighborhoods are being extracted from and who is benefiting from over 600,000 tons of soil movement over the years. Through this mapping I hope to draw connections between clean soil movement and environmental justice populations, understanding where ecological investments are being made, and if it’s an equitable system.

Sophie Weston Chien

Aftermath

2024

Environmental Justice Area Census Tract Designation [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/ykru-djh7], NYC Clean Soil Bank Generating and Receiving Sites [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/b4dv-8mq4], NYPD Complaint Map (Year to Date) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/2fra-mtpn]

Squirrel Census

The Squirrel Census is a multimedia science, design, and storytelling project focusing on the Eastern gray (Sciurus carolinensis). They count squirrels, data-profile green spaces, and present their findings to the public.
In October 2018, the Squirrel Census — with the help from The Explorers Club, NYU Department of Environmental Studies, the Central Park Conservancy, New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, and over 300 volunteers — led a complete count of the squirrels in Central Park in New York, NY. It's the first time this has ever been accomplished. All of the data was released through NYC Open Data. 
The team also created the Central Park Squirrel Census 2019 Report, which is as much a survey of Eastern grays as it is a profile of one of the world's most popular urban green spaces. It includes:
- a five-foot-long "terrestrial" map of Central Park that is one of the most comprehensive surveys of the green space ever created (the first major update since 1994) and includes observations on human activity in the park and at least two newly named locations
- a five-foot-long “celestial” chart showing squirrel locations, population densities, fur coloration patterns, and other data
- a “Squirrel Supplemental” with 37 pages of additional squirrel data, insights, and stories
- the “Central Park Squirrel Census Audio Report,” a 45-RPM experiential soundtrack of the park using notes gathered during the Census and read by Squirrel Sighters and the Squirrel Census team
- postcards, a “baseball card,” and other fun

Squirrel Census

Digital Twin

2020

2018 Central Park Squirrel Census - Hectare Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/ej9h-v6g2], 2018 Central Park Squirrel Census - Stories [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/gfqj-f768], 2018 Central Park Squirrel Census - Squirrel Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/vfnx-vebw]

The Entirety of NYC Land

The map of NYC is often of the five boroughs, however, this map is an incomplete showing of the entirety of land the city owns and operates. Nearly half of the land under city government jurisdiction can be found upstate, all revolving around its water source, a series of reservoirs and infrastructure that allows the people of both the city and upstate communities to survive. This incredible infrastructural achievement requires a symbiotic relationship of both populations, an attribute that has been neglected for much of its history, however, has been attentively harmonizing in the past few decades. This is not a history project, though it depends upon what has come before to understand its current position. This is an ongoing debate, with land being acquired in the Catskills by the city in the present day. Exploring and explaining these bodies of water, the lands that surround them, and the populations they support is critical for its future environmental, political, and sociological success.

Natch Quinn

Corpus: Bodies of Data

2025

Land Acquisition Statistics [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/39yy-hdfd]

Data from the NYC Department of Environmental Protection's Servers (login required), AA and AAs Classified Watersheds [https://data.gis.ny.gov/datasets/141276dcd3fc48b195179146456cb615_1/about], NY State Digital Elevation Models [https://gis.ny.gov/nys-dem], NYC Borough Boundary [https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/DCP::nyc-borough-boundary/explore],

The Oracle of Gotham

Step right up and take your turn at the Oracle of Gotham, a machine-medium that channels cyclical rhythms in New York’s urban data to convey prophetic messages from the city’s collective unconscious.
Visitors may request a prophecy for a future date, generated by LLMs from patterns in NYC OpenData. These messages are poetic distortions of real urban cycles, reframing data-driven prediction as an exercise in attunement rather than practical forecasting, tuning us to rhythms of activity and rest, abundance and scarcity, presence and loss.

Karissa Whiting,Elizabeth Costa

echo{logies}

2026

311 Service Requests from 2020 to Present [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/erm2-nwe9], Motor Vehicle Collisions - Crashes [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/h9gi-nx95], DSNY Monthly Tonnage Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/ebb7-mvp5], Rodent Inspection [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/p937-wjvj]

NYC Weather Data (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/city/time-series/USW00094728)

The Subway Above Ground

Income inequality is a defining characteristic of New York City, but it is easy to be unaware of it. Many New Yorkers use the subway to get around, rendering the above ground conditions of the places we travel through largely invisible. In this piece, I use music as a metaphor and measure of inequality, and the subway as a means of following the data through space and time. The result is a meditative piece in which the dramatic contrasts of a song echo the dramatic differences of income in the city. 
Here you can stream or download one of 22 media files that loosely follow full rides along 22 of the MTA subway lines. Once you start to play the file, find your station, and listen to the song in the background as you ride the subway. The quantity and power of the instruments at any given moment in the song correspond to the median household income of the neighborhood that you are passing through. If you start in the outer boroughs, the song may sound quiet and repetitive at first, but the instruments begin to swell as you near higher income areas such as midtown or the financial district.

Brian Foo

Ground Truth

2021

Census Tracts [https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/resources/datasets/census-tracts] | Subway Stations [https://data.ny.gov/Transportation/MTA-Subway-Stations/39hk-dx4f/about_data]

The Time of Sexual Trauma

How does sexual violence live in the collective time of New York City?
This piece explores the intersection of Time and sexual violence. Using the dataset titled Rape and Sex Crimes based on NYPD Compliant Data Historic, the piece visualizes the Time (time of day, length of reported occurrence, date) of reported sex crimes. Programmed LED lights signify when in the day the reported sex crime occurred. As a clock goes through the hours of the day in sped up time, 365 lights representing the days of 2016 light up signifying a sex crime has occurred at the given time.
Patterns appear as bursts of light, showing not necessarily when the violence occurs, but how it is recorded by the NYPD. In the collective memory of bureaucracy and the NYPD, the time of sexual trauma is rounded up to the hour or the half an hour. It is estimated that only about 40% of sex crimes are reported to the police according to RAINN, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization. And sexual misconduct by the police is even less likely to be reported. And so we return to the question, how does sexual violence live in the collective time of New York City?

So Yeon (Soy) Jeong,Ye Eun Jeong

8 Questions for the City

2018

NYPD Arrest Data (Year to Date) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/uip8-fykc]

The Timelines Project

The Timelines Project examines how open government data on arts and culture often reflects historical biases about culture’s role and value. Limited civic engagement causes these datasets to overemphasize specific practices, arts organizations, budget figures, and infrastructures. The project reimagines NYC’s open data by juxtaposing it with sentiment-driven data from local cultural advocates between 2023-2025. Through in-person workshops, participants mapped key events informing their advocacy, generating a counter-corpus of knowledge highlighting how purpose-driven data can bolster open data’s transformative potential.

Mauricio Delfin

Corpus: Bodies of Data

2025

Latin Cultural Organizations [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/799n-b76v], DCLA Cultural Organizations Capital Funding [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/7hgn-sgmk], DCLA Cultural Institutions Group Funding [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/ka27-qx5k], DCLA Cultural Organizations [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/u35m-9t32], DCLA Programs Funding [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/y6fv-k6p7], New York City Art Galleries [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/tgyc-r5jh], New York City Museums [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/ekax-ky3z], MUSEUM [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/fn6f-htvy], ART_GALLERY [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/43hw-uvdj]

The Worst Landlord in New York

You’re at home. Imagine that water starts dripping from the ceiling. Or the heat goes out. Or a family of cockroaches start to explore your kitchen (maybe all of these things happen at once). So you call your landlord to tell them about the problem (or housing violation as it’s properly called because your rights to decent housing have been violated). And… nothing happens. The leak carries on, the apartment is still cold and those cockroaches have just had their great grandchildren. Maybe you don't have to imagine this situation, this is what life is like for many New Yorkers. Private landlords often don’t do what they are supposed to - take care of the people who live in the buildings that they own.
This piece is about just one of those private landlords, Jason Korn. He is the worst landlord there is according to open data from New York City government. In 2019, at any given time, he had an average of 2,877 housing violations in New York that he had not addressed. This work tries to visualise all of those violations in one single building. The design is based on an apartment block that Korn really does own - 250 East 29th Street in Flatbush, Brooklyn (Korn is apparently so proud of the place that he named his huge real estate company 250 East 29th Street LLC).

Mona Chalabi

Digital Twin

2020

Property Valuation and Assessment Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/yjxr-fw8i], Housing Maintenance Code Violations [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/wvxf-dwi5]

Building Information Search (https://a810-bisweb.nyc.gov/bisweb/bispi00.jsp)

Tower of Babel: Bodies of Language in Lexicon

Our project explores NYC’s linguistic diversity by imagining neighborhood-specific creoles—languages shaped by local cultural convergence. Through an interactive map installation, users will be able to hear a unique creole, generated by a language model weighted by NYC’s linguistic demographics. This audiovisual experience highlights the evolution of language influenced by native speakers and particulars of a locality. By presenting a fragmented language and subsequent comprehension, we showcase how language unites diverse communities through shared expression and history.

Aida Razavilar,Paul Hanna

Corpus: Bodies of Data

2025

Population of the Limited English Proficient (LEP) Speakers by Community District [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/9ji4-nien]

Turnstile Murmurations

Turnstile Murmurations transforms New York City infrastructure into a responsive light sculpture. Echoing Marcel Duchamp’s readymade, the serial logic of Sol LeWitt, and the industrial luminescence of Dan Flavin, the work reclaims a turnstile —replacing mechanical rotation with illumination. Ridership data from the 1/2/3, 4/5/6, and N/Q/R lines triggers pulses of light that swell and recede. The result is a luminous tracing of the city’s circadian rhythm, mirroring our collective cycles of congestion and calm.

Trpti Sanghvi

echo{logies}

2026

MTA Subway Hourly Ridership: 2020-2024 (https://data.ny.gov/Transportation/MTA-Subway-Hourly-Ridership-2020-2024/wujg-7c2s/about_data), MTA Art Catalog

Unbuilding

Hidden below every building in New York is a subterranean cavity dug into the earth. These negative spaces contain basements and foundations that make the structures above them possible. Yet these spaces are mostly invisible to us, and many are inaccessible even to a building’s inhabitants. UnBuilding shows an alternate reality where all of the man made structures have vanished, as if yanked out like teeth. Left behind are the ghost traces of the missing buildings: some are only one story deep, some reach surprisingly low belying the height of the structure above, some go all the way down to bedrock. These holes were dug over thousands of years, by thousands of workers, and form a negative inverse city as impressive as the above-ground version we see every day. It is these negative numbers, the space beneath, that make the entire city possible.
Special thanks to Sofie Iommi (Research Assistant), Pratt SAVI and Can Sucuoglu (Data Assistance).

Eric Forman

NaN - Not a Number

2019

Citi Bike System Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/vsnr-94wk], BUILDING [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/5zhs-2jue]

MapPLUTO [https://www.nyc.gov/content/planning/pages/resources/datasets/mappluto-pluto-change] | NOAA Bathymetric DEM [https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/inport/item/64732]

Urban Data Orchestra: Composing the Hidden Rhythms of the City

"Urban Data Orchestra" explores how overlooked temporal layers form the sensory fabric of urban life. Using NYC Tree Census and SONYC soundscape data, it transforms over 18,000 sound events into an interactive instrument. Visitors compose sensory experiences by filtering between overlapping ecologies—birdsong, wind, mechanical noise—revealing how human and non-human rhythms synchronize across seasons. The work proposes that place emerges from accumulated temporal patterns, inviting personal exploration of the city's evolving acoustic and ecological identity.

Elina Oikonomaki,Lukas Lesina Debiasi

echo{logies}

2026

2015 Street Tree Census - Tree Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/uvpi-gqnh]

SONYC Urban Sound Tagging [SONYC-UST](https://zenodo.org/records/3966543)

Waste Rhythms: Living Records of NYC Communities

Waste Rhythms is a living data sculpture that turns New York City sanitation data into data vinyl—fabricated circular records that encode years of neighborhood waste data as concentric rings. Each disc holds the traces of economic cycles, growth, decline and seasonal return. A custom player spins the and reads the rings into tone, inviting visitors to touch, listen, and experience the hidden rhythms of the city's communities, as a living pulse of change and memory.

HaoChe Hung,Tianxing (Vincent) Zhu

echo{logies}

2026

DSNY Monthly Tonnage Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/ebb7-mvp5]

Wasted Potential

The City’s datasets show that more and more food waste is making its way to a compost site each year. “Wasted Potential” opens up the dialogue around this data and questions how we might recognize that edible food contributes to those growth rates. Simultaneously, NYC faces growing rates of residents facing food insecurity that has been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic crisis. This piece opens our minds to the untapped potential of our food waste and asks: “how can edible food be rescued from our waste stream and feed those in need”.
To create the pigments in this work, Renée sifted through the compost waste stream to find reusable resources for dyeing. This process driven action of utilizing recovered food waste to dye yarn, grounds the project in what NYC’s food waste tonnage data actually looks, smells and feels like up close.

Renée Crowley

Ground Truth, IRL

2022

DSNY Monthly Tonnage Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/ebb7-mvp5]

Emergency Food Assistance [https://www.nyc.gov/site/hra/about/facts.page#efap] | Other Organics Collection Totals [https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/about_dsny-non-dsny-collections-FY2019-1.pdf]

Wasted Potential

“Wasted Potential” is a visualization of food insecurity as seen through the wasted food found in our compost and trash bins. Weaving yarn dyed with food scraps to create a "fiber bar chart", each woven panel represents the quarterly total number of meals served at soup kitchens in NYC during the last year (every inch of weaving equal to 10,000 meals). This piece illuminates the untapped potential of our food waste. Not only can these “wasted” materials be used to craft together colorful woven textiles, but how can edible food be rescued from our waste stream and feed those in need. To create some of the pigments in this work, Renée sifted through the compost waste stream to find reusable resources for dyeing. This process driven action of utilizing recovered food waste to dye yarn, grounds the project in what NYC’s food waste tonnage data actually looks, smells and feels like up close and recognizing that not all of it should be composted (yet!).
The City’s food waste tonnage data exhibits growth in the amount of materials that are being brought to a compost facility. “Wasted Potential” questions how we can celebrate the annual growth of a compost program, while recognizing that edible food contributes to those growth rates. Simultaneously, NYC faces growing rates of residents facing food insecurity that has been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic crisis. How can our data collection efforts address this disconnection between these data sets that document our food waste and food insecurity rates across NYC?

Renée Crowley

Ground Truth

2021

DSNY Monthly Tonnage Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/ebb7-mvp5]

Emergency Food Assistance [https://www.nyc.gov/site/hra/about/facts.page#efap] | Other Organics Collection Totals [https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/about_dsny-non-dsny-collections-FY2019-1.pdf]

What our Numbers Don’t Show: the Story of Data Misinterpretation

How can we make sure we are interpreting our data in ways that help us truly understand what’s going on in our city?
This installation uses data to tell a story about how we tell our stories. An interactive, freestanding physical station, it humorously ‘misuses’ several NYC municipal datasets to illustrate ways in which data is commonly misinterpreted. By presenting the audience with a series of blatantly absurd deductions based on valid data, as well as an explanation of the methodological errors involved, it provides the audience with an introduction to key concepts of data analysis such as correlation vs. causation, bias, overfitting, and statistical anomalies. By employing tangible interaction, engaging humor and a clear, welcoming interface, we seek to encourage visitors to listen closely to how the stories we are told (and tell ourselves) about the city and the people in it are constructed - as well as the importance of maintaining a critical view toward these stories.

Mathura Govindarajan,Davíd Lockard

8 Questions for the City

2018

Urban Park Ranger Animal Condition Response [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/fuhs-xmg2], 2015 Street Tree Census - Tree Data [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/uvpi-gqnh], Directory Of Toilets In Public Parks [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/hjae-yuav]

Where are we going?

Where are we going? imagines where we may have been going in the first minute of the new year through the first 100 yellow taxi ride trips. We often assume that data is cold and scientific, a solid block of self-contained and complete information. Instead, I assume it to be porous, full of narrative potential. This piece invites the viewer to invent their own stories and project themselves onto these pathways.

Susan Steinfield

Hidden in Plain Sight

2023

Trip Record Data (https://www.nyc.gov/site/tlc/about/tlc-trip-record-data.page)

Wild Lots

This work encourages speculative thinking about the lifecycles of cities, imagining how vacant space might be returned to nature. A garden bed formed in the shape of NYC is outfitted with a customized mechanism which deposits seeds in precise locations. Visitors specify a location in the city, querying land use data to locate the nearest vacant lot. Seeds are then deposited in the relative location of that site, sprouting over the course of the exhibition.

Craig Fahner,al haley

echo{logies}

2026

Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output (PLUTO) [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/64uk-42ks]

wonder

wonder is a data story in two parts: the first is a visualization of four years (2018–2022) of my photos projected over water, and the second is captured by water drips, with each drop representing an anti-Asian hate crime reported in New York City. 
As a Chinese-American woman, I was deeply affected by the reports of anti-Asian hate crimes that exploded in 2020.  A year later, I realized that I had lost all my wonder for the outside world, and was instead filled with paralyzing fear whenever I had to walk outside by myself.  I have always used data to understand the world, so this time I turned to data to understand myself: I looked through 21,000 of my photos and where they were taken—the most concrete dataset I have of my time outside—and found both the joy I used to feel pre-covid, and the drastic drop in their numbers after.  And as the animation progresses through the pandemic years, water drips to distort the visualization.
With wonder˛ I explore the relationship between intangible external forces and their influence on my internal well-being.  And in the space between water drips, I hope to remind us of the cases that were never reported, never captured.

Shirley Wu

Hidden in Plain Sight

2023

NYPD Hate Crimes [https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/bqiq-cu78]