Home
Portfolio
A Data Love Letter to the Subway

A Data Love Letter to the Subway

A data-driven animation for Fulton Center commissioned by MTA Arts & Design for its 40th anniversary.

The animated installation visualizes each train line as a character whose unique qualities are extracted from MTA data.

Full video artwork.

Drawn to the beauty of the trains' intersections, movements, and idiosyncrasies, Lupi and her team sought to reveal the visual poetry of this infrastructure.

The animation is intentionally black and white, with painterly features - both a nod to the whimsical and elemental nature of picture books and a site-specific effort to counter the visual noise at Fulton Center.

Early sketches.

The team build and organized a comprehensive data repository for the project.

Style explorations.

Next Project

CTrees

Move directly into the next case study without leaving the archive flow.

About the project

Created for the 40th anniversary of MTA Arts & Design, Pentagram partner Giorgia Lupi developed a data-driven animation for Fulton Center, displayed in sync across all 52 screens within the Financial District transit hub. Titled A Data Love Letter to the Subway, the installation transforms each train line into a character, drawing on MTA data to define its distinct traits. By interpreting elements such as age, route, and distance, Lupi constructs a poetic narrative that traces how these lines intersect with commuters and with one another. Reimagining the familiar through a more dreamlike lens, the piece highlights the subtle connections that shape everyday urban life.

The project offered an opportunity to move beyond the subway system’s traditional, static maps. Fascinated by the interplay of routes, overlaps, and quirks within the network, Lupi and her team aimed to uncover the system’s underlying visual poetry. By abstracting data, they reveal patterns of interaction, difference, and connection, as well as moments where paths almost meet. Commuting itself becomes a shared experience filled with countless overlapping stories—brief encounters, missed connections, and unexpected conversations. In this context, the subway acts as both setting and catalyst, framing these interactions. Through this perspective, the installation reframes what is often seen as a source of frustration, revealing instead a network rich with narrative and meaning.

The development process began with an in-depth exploration of subway data, including sources like MTA Open Data and records of missed connections. From this material, the team organized and interpreted the information, considering how it might be viewed from multiple angles. Central to the approach was storytelling: the data was translated into a script that guided the animation. Visually, the piece is rendered in black and white with a painterly quality, referencing the simplicity and charm of illustrated books while also reducing visual clutter within Fulton Center. The train lines are depicted with a hand-drawn aesthetic, preserving the expressive quality of initial sketches and maps.

As people move through the city, they generate data that often remains unnoticed yet shapes their experiences. A Data Love Letter to the Subway brings this hidden layer to the surface, revealing patterns embedded in daily routines. By following the distinct personalities of different lines, the work celebrates MTA data as a reflection of real life, demonstrating how abstract information can offer new ways of seeing familiar systems. In this interpretation, the trains become characters within the broader story of New York, connecting individuals to the city and to one another.

A Data Love Letter to the Subway is currently on display at Fulton Center in New York City, with the two-minute animation presented at the top of every hour through January 5, 2026.

Client

MTA Arts & Design

Sector

Civic & Public
Transport

Discipline

Digital Experiences
Data Driven Experiences

Office

New York

Partner

Giorgia Lupi

Project Team

Yoshi Torralva
Julia Saimo
Ruby Powers
Giorgia Roscini
Ed Ryan
Liz Ryan
Rachel Crawford
Zach Scheinfeld

Publications

Ahmedabad

Connect

A Data Love Letter to the Subway

CTrees

Location

Phone

Email