2025 Exhibition Wall Text
Corpus: Bodies of Data
”Corpus” carries multiple meanings. A corpus might be a body of work, knowledge, literature, or language – the embodiment of activity, values, or beliefs. Corpus can also mean a physical body, an aggregation of organisms, a group of elements or people, or the corporeal substance of a thing.
This year, DxD asked artists to think about the concept of a corpus, or body of data, that can be physical or ephemeral. We imagine a dataset as a body of knowledge that indexes people in a community, events in a timeline, or observations in an area. But datasets are also representations of our bodies and the corpora of living things; collections of individuals, bodies of water, natural and human-made systems, the collectivity of the city. How are these bodies of knowledge born, how do they age, grow, and go through cycles – who animates them and do they expire? And, if we look closely enough, can we discern the shapes of individuals within these collectives? For DxD’s 2025 exhibition, we encouraged participating artists to consider “corpus” through its multiple meanings, such as a body, a dataset, a community, or an organism.
Artists
Elias Bennett, Simon Lesina-Debiasi
Mauricio Delfin
HK Dunston, Jill Sigman, Abigail Regner, Mariya Chekmarova
Michelle Hui
Alison Long, Cass Yao, Keyarow Mosley
Matías Piña, Arden Schager
Natch Quinn
Nishra Ranpura
Aida Razavilar, Paul Hanna
Jessica Reisch
DxD
Data Through Design is an independent collective which organizes an annual art exhibition featuring works that creatively analyze, interpret and interrogate data made available in NYC’s Open Data Portal, a valuable civic resource aimed at increasing information access and transparency. The city’s people and environments are represented in open data and open data likewise belongs to all of us. Transparency is inherent to open data, making it accessible and empowering all of us to use it for change. DxD strongly believes that data generated through government processes belongs to the people and should be robustly available to the public. Access to civic data is a core value of DxD and civic data should not disappear based on changing political circumstances.
DxD’s annual exhibition is part of New York City’s Open Data Week, a series of events and workshops organized by our partners at the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI) Office of Data Analytics and BetaNYC.
DxD 2025 is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and also supported by Pratt Academic Senate. DxD 2025 is presented in partnership with BRIC.
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Aging Out of Place: Chinatown Elderly
Michelle Hui
This participatory piece inspired by mahjong—a symbol of social connection but also a vehicle for the growing gambling addiction among Chinatown elderly—reconstructs a portrait of aging in NYC’s Chinatown. Laser-etched mahjong tiles of elderly residents, historic restaurants, and landmarks, are set against data maps of senior care facilities, healthcare centers, and arrests. The table becomes a site of the tension between what is preserved in data and what is lost, between the richness of cultural memory and the isolation of aging in a diasporic place.
Audience members are invited to move the tiles in this participatory piece, reshaping Chinatown as they follow a storytelling zine. They not only bridge the gap between abstract data and tactile realities
but also reveal their own perceptions of the neighborhood. In reconstructing this space, they confront the question: What does it mean to grow old in a city that does not see you? What stories are buried within data gaps? And how do we choose to engage with, support, or overlook the elders in our own lives?
Data
New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) Facilities & Service Centers
Department for the Aging, Senior Center Local Law 140 Client data
Department of City Planning Facilities Database
NY Police Department Police Department (NYPD) Arrests Data
Body of Waste
Alison Long, Cass Yao, Keyarow Mosley
‘Body of Waste’ is a sculptural installation that invites viewers to witness the autopsy of New York City’s residential waste ecosystem, resurrecting the tangible body behind the data from DSNY’s waste categorization study. Using this dataset, we create a living organism out of liquified silicone and upcycled materials, indexing the collective habits, necessities, and excesses of the city. The recycling and refuse streams serve as its circulation, while the waste categories form components that cluster into organs and flow like cells through its bloodstream.
Data
Department of Sanitation (DSNY) Waste Characterization 2023
Breath Atlas
HK Dunston, Jill Sigman, Abigail Regner, Mariya Chekmarova
This work explores what it feels like to breathe in New York City.
Ten ceramic amphoras represent neighborhoods in the city where constraints on breath have been particularly acute. While the amphoras are uniform in size, their colors, textures, and distortions reflect data on air pollution, asthma rates, poverty, incarceration, and access to green spaces. The artists used settled air pollution collected near the George Washington Bridge as the glaze, firing it onto the ceramics at 2200 degrees to permanently record its presence. In an era when federal environmental justice databases are vanishing, this act of preservation expands the project from a convocation to a desperate effort to safeguard data in a form that can’t be erased.
Data
New York City Community Air Survey (NYCCAS)
New York City Community Health Profiles
New York City Community District Profiles
The Entirety of NYC Land
Natch Quinn
The map of NYC is always depicted as 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. This includes a series of reservoirs, open land, and infrastructure that allow the people of both the city and upstate communities to survive. This incredible infrastructural achievement requires a symbiotic
relationship between 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 relationship is an ongoing political and cultural debate, with the city acquiring land in the Catskills up until present day in order to maintain the city’s water source as an unfiltered surface water collection system. Exploring and explaining these bodies of water, the lands that surround them, and the populations they support is critical for these watersheds’ future environmental, political, and sociological success.
Data
New York Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), land dataset
NY AA grade watersheds
NY State Digital Elevation Model, (DEM), 10 meter resolution
NYC city limit boundary
Final Inch: Mustard, Data, Sauerkraut
Simon Lesina-Debiasi, Elias Bennett
If the six bridges and tunnels which carry a majority of food into NYC constitute the city’s mouths then street vendors are its capillaries, delivering nutrients those final few inches into our own bodies. Taking the shape of an interactive hot dog stand, Final Inch appropriates a familiar form to re-imagine food infrastructure. Trading foil wrappers for systems maps and ketchup packets for herb gardens enables new narratives around networks that feed the city.
Data
Directory of Concessions
City-owned sites that are available and potentially suitable for urban agriculture (Local Law 46 of 2018)
Emergency Food Supply Gap
Hyperphagia
Matías Piña, Arden Schager
Hyperphagia reimagines NYC as a living organism, with its discrete parts functioning as “cells” in an urban metabolism. Using NYC Department of Sanitation waste data, this interactive sculpture
visualizes the city’s cycles of consumption and disposal through generative simulations on upcycled CRT monitors. By engaging with the organism’s “digestive tract” via tactile interaction, viewers confront the systemic inequities and environmental dependencies shaping NYC’s health, sustainability, and waste infrastructure.
Data
Department of Sanitation (DSNY) Monthly Tonnage Data
Disposal Sites
Disposal Facilities
Location of Disposal Facilities
NYC Borough Boundaries
Marsh Temporalities
Jessica Reisch
Marsh Temporalities explores questions around the limits and
expansions of the corporeal form through a consideration of the ecosystems with which we coexist. This project rethinks the human entity with an audiovisual installation that combines site-specific footage with a soundscape of biorhythmic recordings from salt marsh locations around Jamaica Bay, using NYC Parks wetlands data and mapping tools.
Data
NYC Parks Forever Wild Map
NYC Wetlands Map
To fully experience the work,
visitors are encouraged to remove shoes, stand, sit, or lie down on the sound platform.
Warning: Video contains strobing and loud, sudden noises.
Tapestreet: The Fabric of NYC
Nishra Ranpura
‘Tapestreet’ is a musically and digitally woven tapestry collection representing the fabric of New York City. By leveraging the relationship between weaving, computation, text, and music theory, NYC neighborhoods are visualized into aural and textural tapestries. Each tapestry reflects the textures, colors, and musical notes of the story behind the honorary name of a street or an intersection. Viewers are invited to weave their own stories around NYC neighborhoods, contribute their narratives to the collection, and take a piece home.
Data
NYC Honorary Street Names
Street Name Dictionary
Neighborhood Names
The Timelines Project
Mauricio Delfin
The Timelines Project explores how time-based experiences influence the
work of cultural advocates and activists working to improve their communities. Through collaborative workshops with diverse groups, participants map key historical moments that have shaped their cultural advocacy efforts.
The resulting content is published as open data that anyone can reuse and reinterpret. The project uses this information to generate art installations and other interactive content. In these presentations, timelines are interweaved to reveal the interconnections between different situated narratives and alternative orders of time.
The project aims to create a vast corpus of open data produced by citizens,
questioning the notion that data is inherently neutral by highlighting data’s
sentiment-driven and participatory dimensions. It advocates for a more inclusive, community-based approach to working with data, understanding and harnessing its cultural impact.
The installation at BRIC is the project’s first physical manifestation. It uses three timelines generated by members of New Yorkers for Culture and Arts, the Latinx Arts Consortium, and the Shinnecock Nation in Long Island. Presented during Open Data Week, the installation signals data points that intersect with New York State and City open government data, revealing civic engagement’s potential to expand public policy agendas.
Data
Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) Programs Funding
DCLA Cultural Organizations
Completed Percent for Art projects with artist information
DCLA Cultural Organizations Capital Funding
DCLA Cultural Institutions Group Funding
DCLA Cultural Organization Resources
DCLA Program Funding for FY11
DCLA Programs Funding for FY2010
DCLA Materials For The Arts, Donor Information
Tower of Babel: Bodies of Language in Lexicon
Aida Razavilar, Paul Hanna
Plywood, e-ink display, arduino, raspberry pi
New York City is a mosaic of languages, shaped by generations of cultural convergence. Tower of Babel explores the city’s linguistic diversity by imagining neighborhood-specific creoles where English does not supplant one’s language of origin, and where assimilation is not the norm.
Through an interactive map, viewers can explore an imagined version of New York where languages and cultures are shared and developed in tandem. The audio and text outputs have been generated by a language model instructed to create a pidgin language based on language distribution in each neighborhood.
While this is an imperfect attempt at envisioning a future of cultural exchange, the work seeks to challenge the instinct to use English as a default method of communication. We invite viewers to investigate their home neighborhoods and take into consideration the fact that the resulting creole is fragmented and likely difficult to make sense of entirely.
However, fragmented comprehension is still comprehension. The beauty of the creole is that viewers can understand some portion of the text without needing to “assimilate,” in effect, bridging the gap between familiar and foreign.
Data
Population of the Limited English Proficient (LEP) Speakers by Community District