Description

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 (https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/). 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. Stipend: DxD will provide a $900 stipend for project fabrication, as well as installation and promotional support to each project artist or artist team. Please note: applicants must be approved to work in the US in order to be paid a stipend.  The Exhibition will be open to the public from Mark 20 through April 5 2026 at BRIC Art House in downtown Brooklyn. Artists should plan to have work exhibition-ready by March 14. How to apply Submissions should include a project description, a mock up or detailed diagram of the proposed project, a portfolio of past creative projects. Artists are also expected to reference or use at least one NYC Open Data dataset in their project. Other data, including data derived from novel and experimental collection systems, are welcome (in conjunction with the use of NYC Open Data data). We’re interested in participatory data collection; in radical and cognitive mapping; in data that is represented or experienced through time, sound, and other senses. Proposal submission date:  Sunday, November 2, 2025, by 11:59 PM (EST)