Corpus: Bodies of Data

Corpus: Bodies of Data is the 2025 exhibition of Data Through Design (DxD), an annual data art exhibition featuring works that creatively analyze, interpret, and interrogate data made available in NYC’s Open Data Portal.

”Corpus” carries multiple meanings. A corpus might be a body of work, knowledge, literature, or language – the embodiment of activity, values, or beliefs. Corpus can also mean a physical body, an aggregation of organisms, a group of elements or people, or the corporeal substance of a thing.

This year, DxD asked artists to think about the concept of a corpus, or body of data, that can be physical or ephemeral. We imagine a dataset as a body of knowledge that indexes people in a community, events in a timeline, or observations in an area. But datasets are also representations of our bodies and the corpora of living things; collections of individuals, bodies of water, natural and human-made systems, the collectivity of the city. How are these bodies of knowledge born, how do they age, grow, and go through cycles – who animates them and do they expire? And, if we look closely enough, can we discern the shapes of individuals within these collectives?