Corpus: Bodies of Data

About

DxD 2025 Artists + Projects:

Elias Bennett, Simon Lesina-Debiasi, Final Inch: Mustard, Data, Sauerkraut
Mauricio Delfin, The Timelines Project
HK Dunston, Jill Sigman, Abigail Regner, Mariya Chekmarova, Breath Atlas
Michelle Hui, Aging Out of Place: Chinatown Elderly
Alison Long, Cass Yao, Keyarow Mosley, Body of Waste
Matías Piña, Arden Schager, Hyperphagia
Natch Quinn, The Entirety of NYC Land
Nishra Ranpura, Tapestreet: The Fabric of NYC
Aida Razavilar, Paul Hanna, Tower of Babel: Bodies of Language in Lexicon
Jessica Reisch, Marsh Temporalities

”Corpus” carries multiple meanings. A corpus might be a body of work, knowledge, literature, or language – the embodiment of activity, values, or beliefs. Corpus can also mean a physical body, an aggregation of organisms, a group of elements or people, or the corporeal substance of a thing.  

This year, DxD asked artists to think about the concept of a corpus, or body of data, that can be physical or ephemeral. We imagine a dataset as a body of knowledge that indexes people in a community, events in a timeline, or observations in an area. But datasets are also representations of our bodies and the corpora of living things; collections of individuals, bodies of water, natural and human-made systems, the collectivity of the city. How are these bodies of knowledge born, how do they age, grow, and go through cycles – who animates them and do they expire? And, if we look closely enough, can we discern the shapes of individuals within these collectives? For DxD’s 2025 exhibition, we encouraged participating artists to consider “corpus” through its multiple meanings, such as a body, a dataset, a community, or an organism.