data through design 2026 open call
Data Through Design (DxD) is an annual exhibition featuring art works that creatively analyze, interpret and interrogate data made available in New York City’s Open Data portal. The DxD collective is pleased to announce our DxD 2026 Call for Proposals—seeking new art work, or work in progress not yet exhibited, that engages creatively with tangible and/or multimedia expressions of NYC’s Open Data.
This year, we invite projects that explore ecosystems and cycles of life—how data expresses rhythms of growth, decay, renewal, and transformation, as well as the interplay between human and non-human worlds.
We encourage artists to consider how the city, our communities, and data itself can be understood as ecological and cyclical: what accumulates, erodes, regenerates, or lingers as traces? How might data be materialized, embodied, or inscribed by natural processes? How might art reveal the ways human and natural systems shape and respond to one another?
Proposals may engage with living systems, natural or urban ecologies, or information ecosystems. They might examine materiality and craft, murmurations and flows, entropy and genesis, or the sublime scale of ecological change. We are especially interested in work that makes data felt, witnessed, or transformed—through physicalization, interaction, or by exposing how nature itself records and inscribes change.
In our conceptualization of “ecosystems and cycles of life—both natural and constructed,” we mean more than the natural environment. We invite a broad take on these themes and projects that use data to investigate interconnected systems of information, culture, cities, communities, nature and materials.
DxD presents work in a wide range of media and formats such as digital, analog, physical, performance, sound works, walks, installations, creative coding, participatory mapping, drawings, etc. We welcome proposals that expand beyond the gallery walls and will support projects that occur in public spaces and in unconventional formats.