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Art with Data & Data on Art
While we may mostly associate data with computers and spreadsheets, by exploring data through art we can find ways to connect to different audiences and tell more stories. This is why one of Open Data Week’s co-organizers is the Data Through Design art collective, which curates an annual exhibition that features tangible and multimedia expressions of NYC Open Data. More than ever, the Open Data Week program in 2026 featured events with creative and artistic elements *beyond* Data Through Design, with a number of hands-on workshops that demonstrated creative ways of interacting with data.
For the first time ever, Open Data Week kicked-off with a keynote presentation in partnership with the CUNY Graduate Center. Rahul Bhargava, author of Community Data, gave a talk on “Engaging People with more than Charts,” where he shared strategies on how to engage communities through sensory data projects. Bhargava led the audience in a data drumming exercise and had participants taste brownies salted to varying degrees to reflect air quality data.
Data Through Design continued their partnership with BRIC, hosting this year’s art exhibition with the theme echo{logies}. The 11 pieces explored ecosystems and cycles of life expressed in data. We sold out of tickets for the opening reception yet again!
The Data Through Design exhibit at BRIC was also used to host two interactive events. Artist Astrid Malter shared her 4 foot embroidered map of Brooklyn, which included every single street in the borough, while teaching attendees how to sew and encode information with thread. This was followed by a workshop later in the week on weaving data led by designer Sarah Kay Miller. Similarly, on the other side of Downtown Brooklyn, NYU students Star Ajasin and Alissa Kushner led a workshop that explored metadata and data collection methods through making cyanotype prints.
Open Data Week not only used art to explore data, but two events from the Culture & Arts Policy Institute looked at how data can help the arts sector. Open Data 101 for Culture and Arts taught arts professionals ways that open data can help their work. This was followed by From Open Data to Data Commons which previewed CAPI's new Culture Data Commons project, which will host open data about and for the arts sector.
