Amsterdam Data Project
A six-month public data art commission for Amsterdam's giant media screens.
Counting to a Million, the first work in the Amsterdam Data Project, tracked and predicted 50 years of Amsterdam population growth as the city moved toward one million residents. It explored births, deaths and shifts in population across suburbs, turning civic data into a location-specific public sculpture.
The project began after meeting Daan Krijnen from Ngage Media at Refik Anadol's Architectural Intelligence Lab at Fiber Festival. Ngage wanted experimental public art for its national out-of-home screen network, including the giant screens at Amsterdam Centraal Station, and this became the first of a planned monthly series.
The dataset came from Amsterdam's open data platform, with support from DataLab Amsterdam. I combined population data with suburb geometry to build a mapped, location-aware dataset, then tested a simple neural network to predict future values before refining the piece into a more legible, more graphic real-time artwork.
The hard part was not the concept. It was performance. Early blurred and posterised versions were too processor-heavy to run smoothly in real time, so I rebuilt the visual system, merged nearby data points, simplified the behaviour and hard-coded some of the heaviest map calculations until the piece held the look I wanted at a workable frame rate.