‘A Data Love Letter to the Subway’

Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design for its 40th anniversary, Pentagram partner Giorgia Lupi has designed a data-driven animation for Fulton Center, with the synchronized artwork spanning all 52 screens across the FIDI transit hub. The animated installation, A Data Love Letter to the Subway, visualizes each train line as a character whose unique qualities are extracted from MTA data. Imaginatively unpacking and animating each line’s age, length, and path, Lupi writes a poetic story that explores the trains’ interwoven encounters with commuters and one another. By turning the overfamiliar into a dreamy narrative, Lupi’s Love Letter reveals the connections that hum in the background of our shared urban life.

Agency

Pentagram

Practice Area

Client

MTA Arts & Design

Industry

The Challenge

Lupi was selected for MTA Arts & Design’s Digital Art program at Fulton Center, delivering a 2-minute long video installation spanning all 52 screens of the downtown transit hub. Given carte blanche, Lupi and her team took this commission as a chance to envision the subway system beyond a static informational map.

Project Vision

Starting with a story, Lupi and team developed a data-driven animation that speaks to commuters from across the five boroughs. In Lupi’s Data Love Letter to the Subway, commuting is poetic—a collective experience that generates a plurality of stories as we rub shoulders with other New Yorkers.

Julia Saimo

Samuel Morgan

Samuel Morgan

Samuel Morgan

Samuel Morgan

Samuel Morgan

Samuel Morgan

Design + Execution

The creative solution emerged from the beauty of the trains’ intersections, movements, and idiosyncrasies. Extracting and arranging the train data into a repository, Lupi and her team began to see patterns: the individual characteristics of each train line define its role in the wider system. The trains became characters, and an exploration of their interactions became the narrative and script. By abstracting the trains’ data, Lupi imaginatively unpacks these characters visually, providing a rich view of their differences, encounters, and missed connections.

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. The train’s lines are rendered with a hand-drawn quality that integrates the feeling of the team’s initial sketches and maps. From the beginning, the entire animation was developed spatially, as one large map. In one take, the camera pans around, following the narrative’s choreography. The animation was synchronized and re-ratioed for all screens in the space, from the 55-inch LCD screens that line the passageway on the mezzanine concourse level, to the massive LED walls measuring 31.5 feet by 18.9 feet at street level. Even as commuters transfer or rush to work, Lupi’s story follows them.

  1. Samuel Morgan

  2. Julia Saimo

  3. Samuel Morgan

  4. Samuel Morgan

  5. Samuel Morgan

  6. Samuel Morgan

Project Details
A beautiful, dynamic visual narrative that poetically brought to life the reality of the rather gritty, unappealing NYC Subway system.
Juror 1
This project is ‘joyful’. I can imagine encountering it on my commute and having a moment of quiet calm in amongst the chaos of people. It is simple and clear with a rigorous research piece to ensure it is data drawn from the subway records. Beautifully designed and executed. It tells a story on multiple levels. The hand-drawn finish makes all the difference to the end result.
Juror 2
Design Team

Giorgia Lupi (creative director)
Ruby Powers (project coordinator)
Rachel Crawford (project manager)
Giorgia Roscini (animator)
Yoshi Torralva (designer)
Julia Saimo (designer)
Ed Ryan (designer)
Liz Ryan (designer)
Zach Scheinfeld (designer)

Photo Credits

Samuel Morgan (still photography, video direction)
Fahnon Bennett (cinematography)

Open Date

October 2025

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