In 26 Slides (2026)

In 26 Slides explores the history of New York City's trains from 1920 - 1945. This scope covers the competition between privately owned train systems, the introduction of the first publicly owned NYC transit organization, and the merging of all three to become the NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority that we know today.

Through an incredible partnership with the New York Transit Museum, who also exhibited the installation, our team gained access to archival ridership data. We extracted tables and statistics using OCR tools and transformed numbers into relational maps. Each acrylic slide contains a layers of colored acrylic maps representing the ridership of each transit company and are engraved with historical context of that year. The form takes information from rectangular petri dishes, allowing the audience to look through the multiple slides at once.