Broken and Beautiful
285+ answers in a New York public interaction: what feels beautiful, what feels broken?
- Role Solo
- Year 2024
- Role: Solo
- Year: 2024
Project highlights
285+
public responses
2 days
interface build
NYC
public interaction
Built and ran a public interaction piece in New York that gathered 285+ anonymous answers to one question: what feels beautiful, and what feels broken.
Research · Public ArtSolo · Self Initiated
285+ responses. 15 street interviews. A quiet thread of human thoughts, gathered in parks and on phones across New York City.
The Stand
A Reddit thread: places to cry in NYC.
What I wanted the space to feel like: quiet enough to think, open enough not to feel alone.
A stop sign already means something. Redeployed not as a warning, but as an invitation.
Moment of truth. Union Square Park.
The Site
I had an idea to create an online, Reddit-like site to store stories.
Each poster a small bet on which stranger stops long enough to scan.
Responses coming in. What felt broken, and what felt beautiful.
Union Square subway.
Words people kept using, given visual shape. Not illustrating, just looking.
An image of what we carry without knowing others carry it too.
Street Interviews
Fifteen strangers. One question. Here are four of them.
Back to top↑I built the interface in two days and spent the rest of the project reading what people submitted. The responses were more specific than I expected. Not “my grandmother” but “my grandmother at 3am.” That specificity kept appearing across hundreds of entries: people writing for themselves but somehow writing for each other. In public research, the prompt created the opening. The artifact recorded what people chose to share.
Next project Encoded→ An AR exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reinterpreting the American Wing th... Back to top↑