Our Neighbors:
Urban Animals of New York
This project, which was exhibited at Data X Design 2022 is an experiment in data visualization. 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. I hope this piece helps people to think about all the nonhuman animals that share urban space and its many landscapes with us.
The Data X Design Exhibit, Ground Truth, New York, 2022.
Project Details
Urban Animals of New York was part of a collective exhibit at NYC Open Data Week, Data Through Design. DxD presented Ground Truth IRL, the 5th annual public exhibition of 12 data-driven, interdisciplinary art projects to the public in Brooklyn, in March, 2022.
Data Through Design is a yearly data art exhibition featuring works that creatively analyze, interpret and interrogate data made available in NYC’s Open Data Portal. The theme for this year was Ground Truth: the insight we receive from being ”on the ground,” collecting or confirming data through direct observation, as opposed to abstract estimates, samples, or reports derived from remote locations. As our large-scale social and environmental upheaval continues, we invite artists to step out into their world to examine the relationship between lived experience and the overlay of data and mediated information used to interpret such experience. These works investigate data’s relationship to physical place and personal experience.
This piece was exhibited along with eleven other projects that investigated the theme of “ground truth,” and displayed at 9 Hall Street Gallery Space, Brooklyn, New York.
The data sculpture was displayed along with three posters that visualized data from Urban Park Ranger Open Data.
The sculpture is arranged to reflect the seasonal nature of the data (e.g. more animals sitings occur in spring and summer).
The posters and the sculpture are both color-coded to represent each animal data set by borough.
The sculpture contains bits of nature taken from each of the NYC parks that are referenced in the data set.
The beads on the sculpture correspond to the health of the animals (e.g. the number aligns with the health category).
The animal health status was recorded in the data set and reflected by color in the urban landscape.
Detailed image of the poster depicting all of the individual animals that appeared in the data set.
The poster depicts the various parks in New York City where data was gathered.
There were an astounding 182 species represented in the data set, and the animal that appeared most… raccoons!