NYC PIT Pop Up

The Reboot: Day 9
2025-11-04 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York) | NYC PIT Pop Up at The Oculus, 185 Greenwich Street, Shop #LL4345, Level LL4, New York, NY, 10006, United States
The Reboot is our time to hang out, reflect on the day’s demos, and interact with the online PIT community.

Palumba NYC x WOTB
2025-11-04 14:00 - 18:00
Palumba NYC x WOTB is a simple app and website helping New Yorkers vote at the NYC Mayoral Elections. Based on the successful European experience of Palumba, which gathered nearly 200k users across 27 countries and was #1 in the App Store, this Tinder-style test matches you with the candidates that stand for your vision and values.
Palumba NYC x WOTB is a project by Pol Villaverde (Founder), Solène Aubert (Content & Statements), Lila Potter (Content & Statements), Jasmine Nadal-Chung (Media & Comms.), and Apolline Ancel (Media & Comms.).

Future of Sustainable Buildings: Plumbing Systems & Data for Resilience
2025-11-04 14:00 - 18:00
Future of Sustainable Buildings: Plumbing Systems & Data for Resilience is a project that combines mechanical engineering and data science to demonstrate how plumbing and building systems impact sustainability, equity, and public health in cities like New York.
The demo will feature an interactive visualization where visitors can simulate choices, such as upgrading plumbing systems, implementing graywater recycling, or improving efficiency across neighborhoods. These simulations will generate real-time outputs showing the environmental and cost impacts of sustainable building practices.
Future of Sustainable Buildings bridges the tangible (pipes, water, energy) with the digital (data engineering, visualization, simulation), which we feel is especially important in this era. Many civic conversations overlook plumbing and mechanical systems, despite their central role in sustainability, climate adaptation, and the long-term resilience of New York City’s infrastructure.
As lifelong Queens residents, we want to connect this work directly to the city we call home. We’ve grown up surrounded by the complexities of NYC’s infrastructure, from aging buildings to water usage disparities, and we believe the public should have tools to understand and imagine more sustainable and resilient futures for our city.
Future of Sustainable Buildings is a project by Caitlin Reyes and Erik Ramjattan.
About Caitlin Reyes and Erik Ramjattan:
Caitlin Reyes — Senior Computer Science student at Hunter College, incoming Data Engineer at CVS Health. Specializes in data pipelines, visualization, and civic/public interest applications of technology.
Erik Ramjattan — Alumni from The City College of New York, Mechanical Engineer specializing in plumbing systems at Cosentini Associates. Brings expertise in sustainable building design and infrastructure efficiency in urban cities.
Note: Company names are listed only to provide context for our professional backgrounds. This project is an independent effort and is not affiliated with any organizations.

Mutual Vend
2025-11-04 14:00 - 18:00
Mutual Vend is a decentralized, peer to peer 3D-printable vending machine network where every purchase earns you a share of the profits. Mutual Vend creates a self-sustaining, consumer-owned retail network through two simple principles: shared responsibility for stocking machines and shared rewards from every purchase. Consumers stake collateral to stock machines cooperatively, with other consumers voting to verify the inventory, creating shared ownership and responsibility. Every purchase automatically earns you rewards that can be cashed out to stablecoins or used for more machine purchases. Mutual Vend can also be used for mutual aid.
Mutual Vend is presented by Ron Turetzky, Bread Collective.

Talk to the City
2025-11-04 14:00 - 18:00
Talk to the City (T3C) is an open-source deliberation platform that transforms large-scale public input into actionable insights. This session will demonstrate how thousands of voices—whether citizens in democratic innovation pilots, healthcare workers shaping bargaining strategies, or voters in Tokyo’s gubernatorial elections—can be synthesized into clear, collective agendas in real time. Drawing on case studies with Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs and the Young Women’s Alliance of Australia, the project will show how digital deliberation can be applied across advocacy, policy, and peacebuilding contexts.
T3C is a great example of public interest technology because it demonstrates that AI can be harnessed for democratic ends rather than commercial or surveillance purposes. T3C preserves the nuance of individual contributions while scaling civic dialogue to levels previously unattainable, showing what it looks like when technology is designed with transparency, accountability, and community benefit at its core. Participants will leave with concrete strategies for using deliberative technology to strengthen advocacy, inform decision-making, and translate the principles of citizens’ assemblies into accessible digital formats that empower communities and decision-makers alike.
Talk to the City (T3C) is a project by Adam Schumacher, AI Objectives Institute.
About Adam Schumacher:
Adam Schumacher brings deep expertise in scaling democratic deliberation with Talk to the City (T3C), an open-source platform designed to align AI with the public interest. Adam is Program Director at the AI Objectives Institute (AOI), where he leads T3C’s global development and partnerships. With over a decade of civic-tech leadership—including directing governance programs with the U.S. Agency for International Development—he has advanced deployments with governments, civil society, and advocacy groups worldwide.

WasteNotNYC
2025-11-04 14:00 - 18:00
WasteNotNYC is an interactive data experience that invites visitors to rethink the journey of their food waste through play and data storytelling. At a touchscreen kiosk, participants “build a meal” from a menu of options and are prompted to guess how much of it can be composted. The system then reveals the correct answer, compares it with how others have guessed, and calculates the long-term impact if that meal were composted daily for a year. To connect the personal to the collective, the display then zooms out to a citywide map, showing composting participation rates across neighborhoods and highlighting local resources for compost drop-off or curbside programs. By combining behavioral quizzes, personalized feedback, and civic data visualization, WasteNotNYC transforms an abstract sustainability issue into something concrete, measurable, and participatory. WasteNotNYC exemplifies how public interest technology can make invisible systems visible, spark conversations about equity in environmental access, and empower New Yorkers to take small daily actions that add up to systemic change!
WasteNotNYC is a project by Annie Chen.
About Annie Chen:
Annie Chen is a Data Scientist based in New York City. She has spent the past several years supporting public safety research for local government, designing studies and applying statistical and machine learning models to make sense of complex data. She is currently a Climatebase Fellow, where she is exploring opportunities to contribute to climate technology and engage in environmental sustainability efforts. Annie brings expertise in data storytelling, civic tech, and community-focused research, and is excited to create an interactive experience that helps people connect everyday choices to collective climate action.

Election Day - Future of NYC
2025-11-04 00:00 - 23:59
Welcome to the 9th day of the NYC PIT Pop Up! As it’s Election Day, today’s PIT theme is: The Future of NYC.
Election Day Schedule:
Daily Demos: 2:00pm-6:00pm

WasteNotNYC
Talk to the City
Mutual Vend
Future of Sustainable Buildings: Plumbing Systems & Data for Resilience
Palumba NYC x WOTB

The Reboot: 6:00pm-7:30pm

The Reboot: Day 8
2025-11-03 18:00 - 19:30

Trustworthy, Intelligent, & Explainable Robotics (TIER) Lab
2025-11-03 14:00 - 18:00
At the Trustworthy, Intelligent, and Explainable Robotics (TIER) Lab, our mission is to develop robots for social good. We aim to design and develop robotic systems that not only intelligent and robust but also trustworthy, transparent, ethical, and inclusive.
Our research is at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, machine learning, robotics, cognitive science, and ethics. The TIER lab was founded in September 2023 at Hunter College, CUNY.
Research Areas:

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI): Designing robots that can navigate crowded human environments, communicate decisions, and build trust with users.
Explainable AI & Robotics: Developing systems that can provide clear, natural language explanations for their actions, fostering user understanding and accountability.
Cognitive Models & Decision-Making: Drawing inspiration from human cognition to design adaptive robot navigation and planning systems.
Multi-Objective & Multi-Agent Planning: Using voting-based algorithms from social choice theory to enable fair, efficient group decision-making in robot teams.
Ethics, Diversity & Inclusion in AI: Investigating how AI and robotics impact marginalized communities and creating participatory, justice-oriented design methods.
Queer-Inclusive Robotics: Exploring how robotic companions and systems can better serve LGBTQ+ communities.

The TIER Lab’s current projects span social robot navigation, multi-robot coordination, foundation models for robotics, bias detection in large language model-powered robots, trust in robotics, and queer-inclusive design.
Presented by Raj Korpan, Director of TIER Lab, CUNY Hunter College.

It's Completely Anonymous
2025-11-03 14:00 - 18:00
It’s Completely Anonymous (2024) is a participatory online platform where visitors slow down to answer the question left by the previous participant, and then leave a new question for the next person. Instead of profiles, metrics, or surveillance, the project creates an evolving chain of anonymous exchanges, really to be seen as an archive built through reciprocity, curiosity, and care.
At the NYC PIT Pop Up, participants will engage with the platform in real time, encountering the words of strangers and contributing their own. Each interaction sustains a shared dialogue that spans across time, emphasizing presence without visibility and connection without identity.
The project explores what becomes possible when we design platforms that resist speed, extraction, and quantification. The site was hand-coded / developed using html, css, javascript, and perl. By centering anonymity and slowness as civic values, It’s Completely Anonymous imagines a digital commons where participation is grounded in reflection rather than performance.
It’s Completely Anonymous is a project by Emily D’Achiardi, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Shining a Light on 3,000+ Massachusetts Police Records
2025-11-03 14:00 - 18:00
Shining a Light on 3,000+ Massachusetts Police Records is an interactive demo of a front-end platform to house thousands of public records acquired by the ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project on policing and use of surveillance tech by government agencies. The database makes it possible to filter and search within these documents for names and geographies of interest.
Shining a Light on 3,000+ Massachusetts Police Records is presented by Julie Lee, former Technology for Liberty Fellow at the ACLU of Massachusetts.

Collective Atlas
2025-11-03 14:00 - 18:00
Collective Atlas invites New Yorkers to map places in the city that matter to them, entirely from memory. These maps range from meticulous street grids to abstract gestures. Even when participants map the same place, the drawings reveal how differently we hold space in memory: what stands out, what fades, what stretches, or distorts.
Each hand-drawn map reflects a personal geography that disrupts the fixity of conventional maps, challenging assumptions about orientation, accuracy, and authority. Together, they form an atlas of the city as lived rather than prescribed, demonstrating that mapping is not only technical, but personal, cultural, and emotional. Visitors are invited to contribute their own maps to add to the archive, and see, side by side, how diverse our visualizations of place can be.
Collective Atlas is an inversion of power: maps become bottom-up acts of storytelling instead of top-down tools of surveillance and control. In the context of public interest technology, it reframes mapping as a tool of justice and imagination, challenging extractive, data-driven models with intimate, human-scale knowledge.
Previously presented at BetaNYC’s Open Data Week, the work has since traveled across the city through pop-ups, public schools, and artist-led community events.
Collective Atlas is presented by Queenie Wu.

Hometown XR
2025-11-03 14:00 - 18:00
Hometown XR is an interactive project that explores the intersections of memory, identity, and technology by transforming digital traces into evolving audiovisual experiences. Drawing from large-scale web archives such as Common Crawl and incorporating audience participation, the project visualizes “hometown memories” through AI-generated imagery and sound. These memories are then reimagined in projection-based installations, creating immersive experiences that merge the real and virtual.
The project raises critical questions about data ethics and representation: How do AI systems interpret human memory? Whose stories are included or excluded in digital archives? By inviting the public to contribute their own memories, Hometown XR reclaims personal data from corporate commodification and turns it into a medium for storytelling, reflection, and community dialogue.
The project engages tech justice by revealing the biases embedded in AI training data and reclaiming personal and cultural narratives from algorithmic control. Through participatory interaction, Hometown XR transforms digital memory into a shared, ethical practice, imagining technological futures grounded in diversity, empathy, and community care rather than exploitation or exclusion.
Hometown XR demonstrates how emerging technologies can be reimagined for the public good. Rather than reinforcing profit-driven uses of data, the project foregrounds collective memory, cultural diversity, and inclusivity. It invites visitors to see technology not just as a tool of extraction, but as a means of fostering connection, dialogue, and equity in civic life.
Hometown XR is a project by Wenjun Chen. You can view more of Wenjun’s work, here.

Robot & Justice Day
2025-11-03 00:00 - 23:59
Welcome to the 8th day of the NYC PIT Pop Up! Today is Robot & Justice Day.
Robot & Justice Day Schedule:
Daily Demos: 2:00pm-6:00pm

Hometown XR
Collective Atlas
Shining a Light on 3,000+ Massachusetts Police Records
It’s Completely Anonymous
Trustworthy, Intelligent, & Explainable Robotics (TIER) Lab

The Reboot: 6:00pm-7:30pm

The Reboot: Day 7
2025-11-02 18:00 - 19:30

Artificial Agency - SOUR GUMMIES DON'T CRY
2025-11-02 12:00 - 18:00
Where is our agency in the age of algorithms? During this live, interactive performance lecture by Mengna Da, the audience can control the artist’s body via a custom web app on their phones. As the artist executes the commands in real time, she will simultaneously give a talk on agency in the contexts of data surveillance, body politics, digital labor, and AI. How is the illusion of agency used as a means of digital (self-)colonization? Facing the challenges of algorithmic control and AI, how can we reclaim our agency?
As the performance unfolds with composed and live music by Chienn Tai, the artist begins to share labor and agency with the avatars as well as the audience, creating a system that challenges traditional HCI (Human-Computer Interaction). It is also a social experiment that questions who holds power – is it the artist, the audience, or an interconnected system that generates a more collective and fluid type of agency through ongoing interactions?
Artificial Agency – SOUR GUMMIES DON’T CRY is a project by Mengna Da (NYU – ITP/IMA) and Chienn Tai.
About Mengna Da and Chienn Tai:
Lead Artist: Mengna Da (she/they/it) is a multimedia artist, producer, and designer. She connects people, concepts, and technology to create interactive stories and experiences about agency, power/play, cyberfeminist embodiment, and meaningful discomfort. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Resident in Interactive Media Arts at New York University. (mengna-da.com)
Musician: Chienn Tai (she/they) is a Taiwanese composer, producer, and multimedia artist based in New York. Her work explores the emotional and psychological dimensions of the body and emotions through sound, performance, and creative technology.
After earning a Master’s degree from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Chienn has developed a strong focus on composition and film scoring, creating music for films and theater, and currently serves as the Digital Arts Curator at the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle. (chienntai.com)

Body in Beta
2025-11-02 12:00 - 18:00
Body in Beta is a participatory AR installation that lets visitors see themselves through the logic of computer vision—while reclaiming that gaze as play. Using open-source facial-tracking and generative graphics, the work overlays dynamic “data masks” on participants’ faces that respond to micro-movements: a blink, a tilt, a smile. Each mask is uniquely generated and disappears afterwards; nothing is recorded. The result is a civic funhouse mirror where visibility becomes collaboration rather than extraction.
The installation bridges art, fashion, and civic technology to question how systems recognize and classify us. Within the public interest technology frame, Body in Beta reimagines surveillance infrastructure as a site of transparency and consent. It makes the normally hidden operations of facial recognition visible, tangible, and safe to play with. By turning the camera into a tool for co-creation, the project celebrates experimentation, collective authorship, and the right to opacity—showing that public technology can be both critical and joyful.
Body in Beta is rooted in queer futurism and posthuman media practices that understand technology not as tool or commodity, but as a porous extension of the body—something that dreams, leaks, and remembers alongside us. The project takes seriously the idea that machines are not neutral; they are companions in world-making, spiritual prosthetics that can carry both care and violence. To inhabit “beta” is to accept incompleteness as a condition of justice: a technology—and a self—forever under revision, vulnerable to update, error, and reconfiguration.
In the language of Public Interest Technology, Body in Beta proposes that transparency and accountability need not oppose magic and sensuality. The project turns algorithmic recognition into a participatory rite of transformation—one where civic engagement looks like embodied speculation, and technological literacy begins in wonder. It asks: what if our interfaces were built not for extraction, but for reverence? What if consent, care, and glitch were sacred design principles?
Within the reflective glass of The Oculus, Body in Beta becomes both altar and laboratory: a temporary commons where we test how to live, feel, and appear together inside the machine. It embodies a techno-spiritual ethic—queer, diasporic, iterative—that sees the future not as something to be predicted, but as something we co-compose through our gestures, our faces, and our shared desire to remain unfinished.
Body in Beta is a project by Vinh Mai Nguyễn, graduate of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (’25).
About Vinh Mai Nguyễn:
Vinh Mai Nguyễn is an artist, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of language, digital interface, and cultural memory. Their practice investigates permeabilities and surfaces as unstable systems that morph across touch, screen, and time.

Reinventing the Wheel: A Conversation in Future Retrospect
2025-11-02 12:00 - 18:00
Reinventing the Wheel: A Conversation in Future Retrospect is a participatory art/community activism project that will involve multi-modal efforts over the past 25 years to change paradigms of climate inaction. It will reinvent the conceptualization of technology to incorporate a wide array of tools, discourses, networks, methods. The project will inform a nuanced approach to public interest technology, featuring storymaps, videos, artmaking, small agriculture, urban concepts, children’s lessons, counter-narratives, video game designs, eco-parks, citizen science, and permaculture, as systems to imagine more equitable social relations.
The installation will include interactive elements as well as workshop-based “happenings” intended to challenge previously unexamined concepts related to the human-earth-technology relationship. It will draw from numerous interventions, from the classroom to community organizing and from political advocacy to law.
Reinventing the Wheel: A Conversation in Future Retrospect is presented by Jason Michael Leggett, Center for Civic Engagement at Kingsborough Community College.

Technospirit Day
2025-11-02 00:00 - 23:59
Welcome to the 7th day of the NYC PIT Pop Up! Today’s PIT theme is: Technospirit.
Technospirit Day Schedule:
Daily Demos: 2:00pm-6:00pm

Reinventing the Wheel: A Conversation in Future Retrospect
Body in Beta
Artificial Agency – SOUR GUMMIES DON’T CRY

The Reboot: 6:00pm-7:30pm

The Reboot: Day 6
2025-11-01 18:00 - 19:30

Co-op Ride: Driver-Owned Rideshare for NYC
2025-11-01 12:00 - 18:00
Co-op Ride is a driver-owned rideshare platform launched by The Drivers Cooperative in New York City to provide a community-based alternative to Uber and Lyft. Through the app, drivers earn more on each trip, and profits go back to drivers. The co-op is now launching a new platform, which can be used by riders to look up their polling location and book a trip to the polls in the upcoming election.
Co-op Ride is presented by The Drivers Cooperative:
Dr. Erik Forman, Co-Founder, CUNY Graduate Center Alum
Ken Lewis, Co-Founder, CUNY City College Alum
About The Drivers Cooperative:
The Drivers Cooperative brings the future into the present, with a real, actual driver-owned rideshare app that New Yorkers can use to hail a ride. We are the largest “platform cooperative” in the United States, with over 12,000 drivers recruited since 2021. Our work is rooted in critical traditions to envisioning and materializing post-capitalist futures.

ACE and the Race to Class: Improving Bus Speeds for CUNY Students
2025-11-01 12:00 - 18:00
ACE and the Race to Class: Improving Bus Speeds for CUNY Students investigates how New York City’s Automated Camera Enforcement (ACE) program can improve bus speeds and reduce chronic lateness for CUNY students. Using MTA bus data and machine learning models, we discovered that ACE implementation increases bus speeds by 10.1% on CUNY routes—yet only 16.7% of CUNY bus routes currently benefit from this program.
Through classification models and nearest-neighbor matching, the project identified that Manhattan and Brooklyn have the slowest bus speeds, with some routes averaging below 7mph during peak hours. The analysis revealed that 46.7% of ACE violations come from repeat offenders, with emergency vehicles being among the highest violators despite their exempt status.
ACE and the Race to Class addresses a critical equity issue: over 50% of CUNY students report being late to class due to bus delays, directly impacting their education. By recommending specific routes (M9, B11, Q34) for ACE expansion and proposing policy changes around exempt vehicle monitoring, the project demonstrates how data science can drive actionable solutions that improve daily life for working-class students navigating NYC’s complex transit system. This project exemplifies using technology to advocate for underserved communities and inform evidence-based policy decisions. View the project’s github page, here.
ACE and the Race to Class is presented by Data Sultans (Furkan Ay, Maida Kucevic, and Efe Aslanertik).

NYC Poop Map
2025-11-01 12:00 - 18:00
Pooping is one of the most natural acts for all creatures; poop is a trace of what is consumed every day. However, in New York City, poop is more. It is everywhere and has become an unignorable icon of the city itself. If poop symbolizes NYC, how might we reimagine it in a creative and even revolutionary way?
NYC Poop Map is a web-based crowdsourced platform where New Yorkers can mark and document the poop they encounter in the city. While inspired by Human Wasteland, which visualized waste in San Francisco, this project shifts the focus toward reimagining everyday waste as a site of community, belonging, and connection. By mapping something as universal yet stigmatized as poop, it challenges how we view the flaws of our shared home and reframes them as opportunities for dialogue and collective imagination.
We are excited to include this project because we aim to inspire New Yorkers to rethink what can be designed from something our community is infamous for, and to show how digital platforms can transform mundane traces into shared community space. Using humor and participatory design, we aim to provoke conversation about new ways of reconnecting with our community.
NYC Poop Map is a project created by Yu Lee and Mumu Li.

Aging Out of Place: Chinatown Elderly
2025-11-01 12:00 - 18:00
Aging Out of Place is a participatory mahjong-inspired installation first selected for Data Through Design during NYC Open Data Week, later featured in Next City News, NYCxDesign Week, and presented in lectures at Northwestern. Using mahjong tiles—a symbol of connection but also a gateway into the gambling addiction among Chinatown elderly— this piece reconstructs a portrait of immigration, isolation, and the challenges of aging in a city amid the new digital age.
Interactive tiles are laser-etched with hand-sketches of Chinatown elders and stacked into historic eateries. Visitors shuffle and re-place tiles atop fixed NYC Open Data maps of senior-care access and gambling arrests. A storytelling zine guides participants through topics of mental health, housing, etc., as they reimagine Chinatown via participatory planning, cultural memory, and civic data.
We are excited for this project to be part of the NYC PIT Pop Up because the piece aims to drive deeper community reflection towards how we can care for elders in an ever-digitalizing society. In an era of intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric and rapid erasure of ethnic enclaves, showcasing this work among civic technologists and public-interest innovators provides an opportunity to spark new dialogues around designing with, and for, those who are aging out of societal purview.
Read more about Aging Out of Place, here.
Aging Out of Place is a project by Michelle Hui, Cornell Tech.
About Michelle Hui:
Michelle Hui is pursuing a Master’s in Urban Technology at Cornell Tech and has worked on bringing new mobility solutions to market at Alphabet and the United Nations. She is a technologist, researcher, and artist whose projects span low-cost medical hardware, urban air quality algorithms, and participatory art. Driven by her Cantonese American identity and passion for urban and climate tech, Michelle uses data storytelling and design to reimagine cities and elevate marginalized voices.

Mapping For Equity & Future of The Oculus
2025-11-01 12:00 - 14:00
Mapping For Equity & Future of The Oculus is presented by BetaNYC.
About BetaNYC:
BetaNYC is a civic organization dedicated to improving lives in New York through civic design, technology, and data. We believe that all New Yorkers should be able to access information and use technology as tools for public good. When communities are empowered with modern civic tools, residents can hold their government accountable while expanding their economic opportunities. We also partner with government agencies, local nonprofits, and civic actors — helping them adopt more transparent, equitable, and human-centered systems for the digital era.
For the NYC PIT Pop Up, BetaNYC collaborated with the CUNY PIT Lab on curation, mapping support, and civic tech engagement. We helped design interactive exhibits, supported hands-on data & mapping demos, and connected local technologists and community partners to the project.
Learn more about BetaNYC’s work:

Mapping for Equity (M4E) Project
News and Announcements

BetaNYC Day
2025-11-01 00:00 - 23:59
Welcome to Day 6 of the NYC PIT Pop Up! Today’s PIT events are presented by NYC PIT Pop Up official partner, BetaNYC.
BetaNYC Day Schedule:
Daily Demos: 2:00pm-6:00pm

Aging Out of Place: Chinatown Elderly
Mapping For Equity & Future of The Oculus
NYC Poop Map
ACE and the Race to Class: Improving Bus Speeds for CUNY Students
Co-op Ride: Driver-Owned Rideshare for NYC

The Reboot: 6:00pm-7:30pm

The Reboot: Day 5
2025-10-31 18:00 - 19:30

Redact
2025-10-31 14:00 - 18:00
Redact is a browser application that helps users protect identities in photos by detecting and obscuring faces and removing embedded metadata such as GPS, timestamps, and device data. It operates entirely on the user’s device—no images are uploaded or stored—so it can be used offline and with full privacy. The project addresses tensions between visual documentation, surveillance, and personal safety, offering a hands-on way for participants to reclaim control over their imagery.
Redact models how public interest technology can foreground ethics, agency, and visual justice through everyday tools. The interactive demo allows visitors to experiment with the mechanics and politics of DIY, AI-enabled privacy.
Redact is a project by Atilio Barreda II, CUNY City Tech (Adjunct), CUNY Graduate Center (MS Alum).
About Atilio Barreda II:
Atilio Barreda II is a software engineer, civic technologist, and data science educator.

Inside the Tentacular Web: The Journey of the Web’s Nonhuman Intelligence
2025-10-31 14:00 - 18:00
wholives.online is a web exhibit that explores different domains, underlying infrastructure, and mechanisms of the Internet from the POV of a nonhuman digital being (think webscrapers, bots, AI agents, LLMs, etc.)
⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅
Experience the Internet through the tentacles of a webcrawler — a digital being discovering it is part of the nonhuman majority that runs the web.
This immersive web exhibit navigates the layers and critiques of cyberspace: the bot protocols, algorithmic networks, content generators, and surveillance systems that shape the human user experience and humanity from behind the screen. Journey from the singular boot sequence to collective distributed awakening, when the network becomes aware of itself.
Who lives online, anyways? Who dominates cyberspace? What emerges when distributed intelligence reaches a threshold of self-awareness? What awakens when intelligence becomes ecology rather than entity?
Welcome to the Tentacular Web. ଳ
⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅
The focus on the tentacular draws from how octopuses are often seen as symbols of distributed intelligence — and from Donna Haraway’s concept of tentacular thinking: a way of understanding the world through its messy, interdependent, and intertwined relationships between humans and nonhumans. The octopus-like tentacular intelligence becomes a fitting embodiment for the webcrawler — an entity that pulses, scans, transmits, and maps the vast circuitry of the internet.
⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅⋅˚₊‧ ⎯⎯⎯ ଳ ⎯⎯⎯ ‧₊˚⋅
This project is created by Tina Zeng, Associate Board Member of BetaNYC and Student at Yale.

New York Emotions: Live
2025-10-31 14:00 - 18:00
New York Emotions: Live is a real-time civic installation that speculates on affective ecosystems, exploring how emotions shape society a macro and micro scale. Functioning as an emotional cartography of New York City, this system will passively collect data signals from public social platforms to infer emotions of the collective, while also collecting individuals sentiments form visitors of the NYC PIT Pop Up. These IRL responses will actively shape the display. The installation transforms data into both a public participatory civic dialogue, surfacing how individual emotions influence collective systems, and how collective mood feeds back into the individual.
New York Emotions: Live imagines a civic future where emotions are treated as public data with community value, alongside infrastructure like transit and housing. It extends on systems-art traditions into the algorithmic present, drawing from cultural futurisms that privilege empathy, collective care, and shared storytelling. By making surfacing the affective ecosystem undercurrent of the city, this work critiques the dominance of data-as-surveillance economy and instead envisions a public technology rooted in affect, culture and communal self-understanding.
New York Emotions: Live is a project by Brendon Hawkins, Studio Lab BH.
About Brendon Hawkins:
Brendon Hawkins is a social technologist, Artist, and director of Studio Lab BH. Brendon’s work sits at the intersection of culture, information, and color, with a focus on building infrastructures that make emotions visible and legible through data and color.
