Yoshi Torralva Helps Write "A Data Love Letter to the Subway"
Every day, millions of New Yorkers move through Fulton Center, one of the busiest transit hubs in the city. For a brief moment at the top of each hour, the usual rush of advertising screens pauses, replaced instead by a quiet, poetic animation that transforms the subway system into a living, breathing story.
That story is A Data Love Letter to the Subway, a new MTA Arts & Design commission created at Pentagram and brought to life in motion by Senior Designer and Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design alumnus Yoshi Torralva (BDes ’22).
Now on view across 52 screens through January 5th, 2026, the installation invites commuters to see the subway not just as infrastructure, but as a place of intersecting lives, daily rituals, and unexpected beauty. Each screen at Fulton Center becomes its own vignette — a small window into the subway’s choreography — and together they form one cohesive film.
As motion designer and core collaborator, Torralva helped shape the conceptual foundation of the project, which was how to translate the vast complexity of New York’s subway system into a cinematic, emotionally resonant experience.
Instead of portraying real-time metrics, the team used historical and structural data, like the lengths of lines, where they intersect, and how long they’ve existed, as a lens for storytelling. Torralva emphasized that data wasn’t just a technical input, but the emotional throughline of the narrative.
“Through motion and doing the data work,” said Torralva, “you’re able to have that control over not only how the story’s told, but also how it’s displayed.”
Torralva described this as his first project where data and motion were truly inseparable. The constraints of data didn’t limit creativity; they revealed poetic patterns and rhythms hidden within the system.
Designing for the Fulton Center meant working inside an environment saturated with movement and noise. Torralva was acutely aware of the reality that commuters are usually in a hurry — and that any artwork in this context must meet people where they are.
Torralva and the team chose to strip the visual language down to its essentials — black and white, hand-drawn, quiet, confident — to create a contemplative counterpoint to the sensory intensity of the station.
The design doesn’t demand attention; it invites it. It gives commuters a moment to slow down, even if only for the span of a breath between trains.
Torralva stressed that an installation of this scope is rooted in collaboration — not just with designers, but with project managers, videographers, the team operating Fulton Center, and the MTA Arts and Design..
Torralva spoke about how designing for public infrastructure requires a unique mindset: being ambitious about the storytelling while deeply respectful of the lived experience of the people who will encounter the work.
This project, he noted, taught him how to balance vision with feasibility — how to honor the emotional core of a story while ensuring it works at scale, across dozens of screens, in a complex public environment.
Reflecting on his time at CMU, Torralva highlighted how formative it was in preparing him for this kind of interdisciplinary work.
“I got so many of these opportunities that I didn’t expect,” said Torralva. “I wouldn’t be at Pentagram without those experiences.”
He noted that courses and collaborations that asked him to think systemically, to pitch his ideas, and to connect design decisions to human stories built the foundation he still draws upon.
These experiences gave him the tools, combined with his own creative rigor, to bring something as intricate as A Data Love Letter to the Subway into the world.
For the School of Design, Torralva’s work stands as a profound example of what it means to design for the public: to create spaces of connection and reflection in the flow of everyday life.
A Data Love Letter to the Subway transforms the familiar into the extraordinary. It reminds us that even the most utilitarian systems hold meaning — that beneath the noise of the city, stories are always unfolding.
Torralva’s contribution to this work invites all of us, even in the rush of our commutes, to look again.
A Data Love Letter to the Subway runs in the Fulton Center until January 5th, 2026.
All images from Pentagram.