The rat population in New York City and its interplay with human behavior reveals an interesting relationship between ecological consequences and urbanization.
These rodents, thriving on human waste in New York, embody a silent testimony to our consumption patterns, waste disposal practices, and the ever-expanding urban footprint.
Rat Revolution is an art installation, encapsulating rat sightings spanning from 2010 to 2023. For the 2024 Data Through Design exhibition, DxD invited artists to explore how data reflects lived aftermaths and to interpret the idea of aftermath through data.
During our initial research, we noticed that rat sightings fluctuated with temperature. The two publicly available datasets we used were: 311 Service Requests Dataset from NYC OpenData and Monthly Mean Average Temperature for Central Park, New York from National Weather Service.
We thought it would be interesting to experiment with plotting the rat data in polar coordinates to create an interesting tornado-like structure.
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