Calling Home
A collective vision of a future New York built on stories of awe
Calling Home is a multisensory, multilingual, interactive installation. Co-designed with Barcelona-based digital futurists Domestic Data Streamers, it invited residents to share a moment when New York City amazed them — then transformed each story into an AI-generated image that joined a collective gallery inside a “city home” sculpture.
The result: a living, growing catalog of awe — a collective vision of a future New York built on the stories of the people who call it home.
The Experience
Encounter Awe
You've already felt it – in the room, in the music, in the stories being shared around you. The opening panel meets you there, not with a definition so much as an expansion for what counts as awe, and where it already lives in a city like New York.
Call the Future
At a telephone plinth, you pick up the handset and hear a voice in your preferred language – the future New York – asking you to share a moment when the city amazed you. A moment you’d like to pass on to future generations. It's a simple prompt that unlocks something real.
Create Our Future
Your story is transformed into an image and added to the Calling Home sculpture whose patchwork windows look into an ever-growing gallery of New York awe. Your story, alongside hundreds of others, building something larger than any one story.
Catalog of Awe
Calling Home collected hundreds of stories across languages, ages, and neighborhoods. The themes that emerged were strikingly consistent: neighbors looking out for each other, strangers becoming community, small businesses holding grief and memory, the city showing up in moments of crisis.
“There was a moment after Hurricane Sandy in our neighborhood in Park Slope when the community all came together to create a humane shelter at the armory. And there were 500 people there, and we created a wellness center. And people wrote stories and told stories and sang music. And people from all over the neighborhood came and took care of each other. And we had this image in our minds of the Superdome as this horrible shelter after Katrina, so we tried to create the opposite. And it was a beautiful picture of people.”
“A moment in New York City that amazed me was when I was around 3 years old and I was walking on 34th street and I looked up and saw the Empire State Building and it was just so huge and I think it was the first time I realized scale and just the crazy things that we create. Obviously in retrospect I'm saying that but it was a moment of awe for me of whoa when I was so little seeing this big structure.”
“My moment was running in the New York City Marathon for the first time hitting mile 8 or 9 on Lafayette Avenue where the crowd was just out and screaming and being supportive and I wasn't tired yet and it's almost as if I was just sort of carried along by the energy of the crowd.”
"For me it was walking with more than 100,000 New Yorkers following a little girl named Little Amal, and it was walking with her. She represented, it was a big 12-foot-tall puppet that represented immigrants and refugees from around the world trying to find a way to get to a place that is safe and welcoming and loving and where they can thrive. Being able to go to parades and celebrations across the city, you know, five boroughs from Brooklyn to Queens to Staten Island, and being outdoors with people celebrating culture, our lives, the fact that we're still here, that still is one of the things that amazes me and brings me wonder."