Sara Eichner is a visual artist and designer with a keen interest in data visualisations and cartography. She works with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and programming languages like Python and uses design software to translate data into comprehensible visual stories. Her work is people-centred and she often uses data to represent less-heard voices.

Eichner is a co-founder of  Studio 2263; a design, data and mapping studio, and works with research accelerators at Pratt Institute as visiting faculty. She is also part of the volunteer collective that organizes Data through Design (DxD), an annual art exhibition (you are invited to participate in) that encourages using public data from the NYC open data portal. Perhaps that is the key aspect of her work, connecting the fields of spatial technology and art, in an open-source way.

While landscape architects often work with spatial data it seems a necessary evil to most but some colleagues like it for a reason. Data doesn’t have to be dull and scary, it can be also fun and quirky. It also feels like the mapping activists are Robin Hoods of today’s society. Data, for instance, can show deep inconsistencies in space and if we know how to collect, organize and represent it, we can construct alternative or missing narratives of people and space.

Before we start spilling over our appreciation for this type of work: We spoke with Sara Eichner about her practice and DxD, about the need to have open access to public data and data creation by participatory mapping.

Public data is a form of public good. However, not all the public data is available at hand – often, we have to contact the services to acquire the data which comes in unreadable formats. Authorities can hold the advantage in forming the narrative using public data. Do you think it is important for cities to have public access to data and allow the public to use it?

The open data program and law in NYC is unique in that all city agencies are required to make a lot of their data open. The data is hosted on an open data portal and it must meet certain standards (for data format, coverage, granularity, metadata, etc.), and be easy for the public to access and use. To celebrate the open data law in New York City, they organise Open Data Week. DxD is a big part of that festival and key goals are to promote awareness of the program and create a sense of shared ownership of that data.

I think transparency is important and the idea of open-source technology, software and data where people can make useful and shared tools is exciting. In a city with open data, activists can access it and advocate, they can find areas and issues that should be prioritized and identify where resources should be directed. The public can gain valuable insights into things like housing, public health or environmental health with this data. Opening the data from agencies to the public empowers us to hold the city accountable. In cities without public data, people are not able to examine, question, and innovate with it. There is a risk of cities being less progressive and people less informed.

How do you approach your projects and what kind of data do you use? What are you looking for in data, some strange patterns and quirks, how do you decide what to map?

When working with clients, I will work with their data. But even then I will explore it and find out if there are some trends, and to see the details behind them, to call out different patterns and/or outliers that might show the viability of data. 

With more personal projects, I come back to my formal interests and how we look at space, and the role our unique points of view and perspectives play in how we perceive it. By taking the data and using it to draw with, I made a project about the Hudson River Valley. Different mark-making techniques for different land uses, population density, and water depth, evoke a sense of that space from above. It is interesting how we understand space and that it can be informed by data and our choices on how we use and represent it.

In another personal project, Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, I was looking at how we value space and comparing contemporary data with the historical data from the Fake Estates. I wanted to see if I could still find the history of Matta Clark’s experimentation with ownership of 15 unusable land parcels that he purchased from New York City in the 1970s. Here I also tried to use data to draw with, to keep revisiting my interest in thinking about space.

Most of my work with data is in collaborations where we try to prioritize and focus on information and parts of the environment and areas that are within underserved or overburdened populations. That is one way you can use GIS in conjunction with planning, conservation, and environmental work that is counter to how maps used to be perceived as an authoritative power structure. We can use those tools to make sure the voice and concerns of disadvantaged communities are represented and pushed forward.

Does your practice fall under the term critical mapping?

I think critical mapping is ingrained in working with data ethically. In environmental justice and social equity, you always want to think about how mapping can be used to expose rather than perpetuate inequities and to privilege voices and information that can correct inequities. It overlaps with counter and participatory mapping. With participatory mapping, community members are included in the map making and it’s often used in community engagement processes by planners to ensure their interests are represented.

One case of participatory mapping Studio 2263 worked on recently was with  Flood Watch and FloodNet, two ongoing projects in New York City.  The existing Flood Watch tool encourages people to create a collective archive and report about flooding from personal observations and photographs. FloodNet is using electronic flood sensors to record stormwater and tidal flooding around the city. We worked with community members to explore ways to bring those two data streams together in a form that would be meaningful and useful to them as tools for advocacy. While the flood sensors are providing important information, human observations about what those floods are like provide important context. Using this qualitative data coupled with quantitative data can give you a much deeper, more nuanced and valuable image of something going on in space than just collecting data from sensors. The results of this project are automated neighbourhood flood reports that the public can generate from recent data on a website portal.

In a project I am working on with LIAVH at Pratt Institute about MohenjoDaro in Pakistan, we are also hoping to do participatory mapping for an archaeology site as a decolonizing process tool, to forefront individual people’s voices by putting their stories on the map to contextualize and reframe the data about the site, and to reestablish a sense of ownership of the story of MohenjoDaro by the people of the area. 

A lot of data you use and map can inform the planners and policy decision-making.

Yes, I’ve been working with Sara Hodges and the NY-NJ Harbor & Hudson Estuary Program on the Hudson Access Project, (hosted at Pratt Institute and funded by the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation) for the past two years. It is a geospatial data and image inventory of every site where the public can access the water around the New York and New Jersey Hudson Estuary. It may not be obvious but it brings together ideas of critical mapping and resources intended for planners. 

We used environmental justice and demographics data to identify sites in overburdened and underserved communities to prioritize data collection around those areas so that it is accurate and validated. The mapped data shows where the public access areas are concentrated. In the areas where there’s a lot of poverty, there isn’t a lot of green or blue space; something that long-term planning can address.

While access to water has increased over the decades it’s not equitable and it’s much more developed in affluent areas. On the other hand, there are undeveloped areas that have been used to restore wetlands and can be used for climate change mitigation to absorb some of the problems of sea level rise. Some of these are in areas of lower income and flooding and there are opportunities to increase this type of public access as part of mitigation interventions.  

Studio 2263 is currently developing a second phase of the project to study proposed climate mitigation interventions around the Hudson Estuary at a regional scale to see how they might impact the public’s access to the water. There is a lot of investment here to prepare for sea level rise where in some cases sea walls and levees will be built around areas of New York City, cutting off or radically changing access to the water. If the public is engaged and informed about this and how to deal with climate change mitigation and interventions, people can be more empowered to work with the government and planners to find the right solutions.

The Saline Water Use Survey is a related project I worked on with RiverKeeper and Save the Sound, initiated as an effort to collect information about where the public is using the saline waters around NYC to provide to the state as they considered lowering water quality standards in the area. By providing evidence that the public was using the saline waters for a variety of activities that involved direct contact with the water, we were able to argue for maintaining or increasing the water standards in those areas.

Site X Site is another project that uses geospatial data analysis to inform planning. It explores the limitations of the City Environmental Quality Review (CEQR) process that is applied to large-scale development and zoning changes in New York City. The goal of this review process was to understand or predict the impact of proposed development on surrounding areas. It has been wrong on a number of occasions where development has resulted in unexpected and increased pressure on housing and vulnerable communities. Site X Site conducted a ten-year retrospective analysis of development to test the criteria and assumptions used in the review process, and to explore alternative criteria. The resulting website and interactive maps illustrate that process and analysis, and they bring the audience into a parallel exploration of local development with contemporary tax lot and other data. This was a collaborative project between two planning organizations (the Municipal Art Society and the Regional Plan Association) where we (Pratt Institute’s Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative) brought analysis, technical work and design to the project. 

Tell us a bit more about the Data Through Design Festival.

It is an exhibition where participants use publicly available data and make art with it. The project is partnered with BetaNYC and the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation where they are excited to help and see their creation of civic data get used. We work with the artists to help them realise projects by providing some financial support, and by connecting them to fabrication facilities and data sources.

To me, the festival is interesting because it brings together two big interests of mine; data and art. It is run by a collective of volunteers who are rooted in data as well as art. We work together throughout the year to create a theme and to produce the exhibition of projects commissioned through an open call. We get proposals from people from a wide variety of professional backgrounds which makes the exhibition truly interdisciplinary and exciting. My hope is to get more artists involved in interpreting data. We like the idea of data becoming more physical and tangible, taking data into new forms in unexpected and unconventional ways and experimenting with reaching people’s other senses like touch and data sonification. It is a way of bridging the gap between the public and their data to make it more accessible.

We’ve had projects that have converted data into sound or music. There was one artist who had an opera singer interpret noise complaints during the pandemic like dog barking and air conditioners. The NY Alive! street performance by Data Vandals (Jen Ray and Jason Forrest) used isotypes in a human data visualization about local statistics. Jennifer Dalton, for example, created a hand-drawn, one-year personal data log on her life and observations on society during the lockdown.

We know maps are traditionally produced from top-down positions and reductive. To round it up – what do you think should be mapped and isn’t and what is and should not be mapped, especially now when devices in our pockets are producing data on us every minute?

There’s a point where I would go from small support of expanding of data to some concern, like the proliferation of data collection, and how much is tracked in the city is also where DxD comes in. We want people to critique that. Is there too much data collected? Is it becoming surveillance? and where is it dangerous? Data can also be reductive to certain points; what is the data missing or leaving out?  DxD asks, how can artists provide context for data that tells us more of the story and gives fuller shape and texture to the stories behind the data?

It’s such a rich area of exploration, what people are doing with mapping. I think the potential is in the subjective and interpretive. It can inform planning to get at our subjective experience and lived experience of space. To embody or evoke is a real challenge. How can a map tell us what it is like to be in a place, what that space is, and what does it feel like?

I think it is important to think about who is making the maps and who is represented more than what is mapped. Maps have always been effective tools to perpetuate power structures, but mapping is also a powerful tool to counter those structures and to examine inequities, and the underlying causes. Maps should include or represent the voices and ideas of the underrepresented. Within that framework, I don’t think there is anything that shouldn’t be mapped. It is interesting to push the boundaries to experiment with what is possible to represent in a map.

Published on October 8, 2024