Data Through Design Exhibition, BRIC Gallery

3D-printed PETG discs, modified turntable, sensors, stepper motor, laser diode, Teensy Arduino

Waste Rhythm (2026)

Waste usually lives on the darker side of city life. We rarely notice trash and garbage unless bags start piling up along the streets. Yet waste is far closer to us than we think. It reveals how we consume and how we live, serving as evidence of human activity and a signal of a community’s vitality or decay.

Waste Rhythms is a living data sculpture that turns New York City sanitation data into data vinyl—fabricated circular records that encode years of neighborhood waste data as concentric rings, with twelve segments around the circle representing months. Like the growth rings of a tree, the discs accumulate traces over time. Subtle rises and falls in surface height mark periods of expansion and decline, forming a data terrain of each neighborhood.

A custom-built player slowly spins the discs, while a stylus reads the rings with a sensor and translates these data into synthesized sound in real-time, allowing patterns in the data to be heard as a living sonic landscape. By transforming urban changes into form and sound, Waste Rhythms invites visitors to interact and experience the city's communities as a living pulse of change and memory.