Summer 2026 - SHORTLISTED

A Data Love Letter to the Subway

Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design for its 40th anniversary, this data-driven video installation spans all 52 screens across the Fulton Center transit hub, visualizing each subway line as a character whose age, length, path, and interactions are extracted directly from MTA operational data. Lupi and her team built the piece from real subway records, including MTA Open Data and missed-connections boards, transforming raw figures into a narrative and script rather than a static infographic. The animation is intentionally rendered in black and white with a hand-drawn, painterly quality — both a nod to picture-book whimsy and a deliberate effort to counter the visual noise of the transit hub itself. In Lupi's own words, the goal was to turn the trains riders take every day into living characters, revealing hidden connections in a system people usually take for granted.