Broadway Data Boogie Woogie
Noah Garcia, Ivan Himanen
View Project
We have reimagined Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie as a traffic data visualization, reinvigorating the century-old abstract art tradition for a 21st-century context.
NYC has always been defined by its mobility: how and when its denizens move from place to place. This reality bears itself out in the city’s art as much as in its data. One of our favorite art pieces is Piet Mondrian’s 1943 painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. Perhaps better than any other artwork, it has found new maturity in the Information Age, where everything can be quantified and aggregated. The artistic movement of which Mondrian was a central figure, now nearly 100 years old, anticipated this reality with its abstraction of the observable world into basic geometry. Our aim is to build on that legacy.
The NYC Open Data web platform hosts many datasets related to mobility, the most intriguing of which is the DOT’s real-time traffic speed dataset. We humbly recognize that the DOT has already created a much more useful visualization of traffic speeds which can be found at the following location: https://webcams.nyctmc.org/. We’ve given ourselves a much simpler goal under the protections of artistic expression to create a dynamic, two-dimensional update to Broadway Boogie Woogie: by taking a map of Manhattan, subdividing it into a grid of squares, and painting each square according to the traffic speed that has been most recently measured. This dataset is updated every half hour, so the image will change in kind.
DATASETS
Real-Time Traffic Information NYC DOT Traffic Management Center
Real-Time Traffic Speed Data NYC Open Data Portal