Grafted Landscapes
Amanda Anderson-You

"Grafting Landscapes" is a visualization made to encourage the viewer to engage with landscape paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection in a new and unusual way, leading them to discover details about the art they may overlook with a traditional view. Thirty open access landscape paintings from the Met were divided into equal slivers and re-aligned at random, positioned vertically based on a hand-assigned horizon value between 0 and 1. The new resulting landscapes show a steady horizon across the middle and variation in sky-to-land ratios throughout the original works.

The Worst Landlord in New York
Mona Chalabi

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).

Long-Lost Twins
Eric Lee & Yen Mooi

“It is easier to ask for forgiveness, than to ask for permission.”

"Long-Lost Twins" is an interactive art installation that confronts us head-on with the more nefarious aspects of “surveillance capitalism”. Our “digital twins” are made up of all the data that are out in the virtual world that pertain to each and every one of us. The data have been collected, given knowingly or unknowingly, sometimes stolen, then sometimes sold, and analyzed for various purposes. These purposes can be beneficial - to inform public policy and provide better products and services that improve our lives - but they can also be nefarious.

I Am Therefore I Am
Jennifer Ding

What does it mean to “exist” in a data-driven world? In our digital lives, our data represents us to others, particularly entities like the social media platforms and government institutions that we interact with every day but will never meet in person. To them, our identity is defined by our data. To Facebook, I exist when I like, click, and post. To my government, I exist when I vote, pay taxes, or pass by a surveillance camera. But our lives carry on independently of these data points, and even the most invasive location or cookie tracking system can only comprehend slices of my identity.

Data is meant to simplify a complex concept, like a person, so information about it can be quickly stored, evaluated, and predicted upon. By categorizing our identity, data delineates and separates us from each other. By using a financial lens to understand our value, data blinds us to our other dimensions of being. In data we are individually replaceable, interchangeable, and insignificant.

As our data is reflected back to us through targeted ads and content, does this narrow our own self understanding? Do we start to relate to our hashtags and assigned categories and interests? The purpose of this exhibit is to visualize the limitations of data to represent identity, to understand another human being, and to make sense of our unquantifiable self. Data is one framework for understanding the world; let us reflect on the others.

Emblems: Symbolizing city data
Mariya Chekmarova & HK Dunston

“On the day when I know all the emblems," he asked Marco, "shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?" And the Venetian answered: "Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems." (Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino)

Does the data we encounter about cities describe, define, or capture them? Or does data, like the ostrich feathers and tales of leaping fish Marco Polo brought to Kublai Khan in Calvino’s fable, offer only glimpses of what a city might be? Is possession of the real city beyond our grasp? The generated emblems, based on data about 15 cities in the US, and reinterpreted through layers of spirographs, capture elements of the variety and dynamism of each city, seeming to distinguish one from another. But they are beautiful cautionary tales, subjective in their creation and expressive in their interpretation. Our hope is that by shifting our view, we might begin to explore the equal, but less acknowledged subjectivity in other, more customary ways of interpreting information about cities. The emblems represent a pantomime of comparison, elaborate gestures to make us pause and consider city data itself, with its implicit authority and rational sharp edges, as perhaps simply another story we tell of distant lands.

Almost Everywhere
Abe Rubenstein & Cameron Yick

Have you ever wondered how much of New York City is geographically referenced by its own public data? By bombarding the features of the NYC Planimetrics database – the foundation upon which all other New York geospatial data rests – with more than 400 million geographic points from NYC Open Data, voids are revealed that materialize the differences between two distinct digital definitions of the City.

Route ‘optimization’ through our digital footprint
Nathaniel Quinn

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.

Best Places to (ALMOST) Die
Devang Thakkar

Best Places to (ALMOST) Die is an art installation that visualizes the travel times for EMS vehicles to transport cardiac arrest victims to emergency rooms across New York City on laser etched acrylic panels. The installation emulates the ambiance of an indie game, one where the characters lose ‘hearts’ when they die. The EMS vehicle’s journey from a response scene to the ER is a complex combination of a multitude of factors which is the reason, simulacra on a digital twin have the potential to help improve response times and suggest optimizations. One of the more common ways in which digital twins have been put to use is in transit management - for example, since the EMS notifies the ER about its arrival, we could temporarily adjust the traffic lights and their sequence to allow for a smoother flow without holding up traffic along other routes. Simulations could also pinpoint locations in the city that require the most attention and could benefit the most from structural and policy changes.

The Squirrel Census
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