On the instructions of MTA Art and Design To mark its 40th anniversary, Pentagram partner Giorgia Lupi designed a data-driven animation for Fulton Center, with the synchronized artwork spanning all 52 screens of the FIDI transit hub. The animated installation, A data love letter to the metrovisualizes each train line as a character whose unique qualities are extracted from MTA data. Imaginatively unpacking and animating the age, length and route of each line, Lupi writes a poetic story that explores the trains’ intertwined encounters with commuters and each other. By turning the all too familiar into a dreamy story, that of Lupi Love letter reveals the connections humming in the background of our shared city life.
This assignment was an opportunity to see the metro system beyond a static information map. Attracted by the beauty of the trains’ intersections, movements and quirks, Lupi and her team sought to reveal the visual poetry of this infrastructure: abstracting the trains’ data provides a rich picture of their interactions, roles, differences, connections and missed opportunities. Riding the subway is a collective experience, and multiple stories emerge as we gather with other commuting New Yorkers. Within these stories, the trains play an integral role: their doors close when we look at someone on the platform, or when a missed stop leads us to a conversation with a stranger. Lupis Love letter prompts us to think about the metro as a backdrop and architect of these interactions. Lupi and her team transform what is often a source of frustration and complaint for commuters and reveal the poetry in the metro’s collective network of stories.
Lupi and her team started the project by reviewing subway records such as MTA Open Data and missed connections signs. They extracted and organized the data, asking how these numbers could be viewed from different perspectives – but mostly they wrote a story, transforming their findings from the data repository into a story and a script. The animation is deliberately black and white, with painterly features – both a nod to the whimsical and elemental nature of picture books and a site-specific attempt to counteract the visual noise in Fulton Center. The lines of the train are drawn by hand, integrating the feel of the first sketches and maps.
As we interact with each other and the world around us, we create data that often lingers in our subconscious. A data love letter to the metro reveals the metro ecosystem through the lens of this data and describes the hidden patterns in our daily lives. Following the characteristics of various lines throughout the subway system, Lupi’s Love letter celebrates the MTA’s data as a representation of the real world, reminding us that data is an abstraction that can provide new perspectives on known structures and patterns. This snapshot of data captures all New Yorkers: the trains are characters in our stories, taking us places every day and connecting us to the city and to each other.
A data love letter to the metro is on view at Fulton Center, New York, NY. The two-minute animation will play every hour at the top until January 5, 2026.
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