The Timelines Project is a participatory art initiative created by artist and researcher Mauricio Delfin.

The project partners with communities to map key events that have shape their cultural advocacy and activism. Through interactive workshops, participants from a community, network, or movement build and explore a shared timeline through dialogue and collaboration. This civic information is then digitized into an open dataset, making it accessible for others to reuse.

The Timelines Project utilizes this anonymous, sentiment-driven open data to create art installations and interactive content, encouraging audiences to engage with diverse historical accounts. Timelines are interwoven to reveal intersections between different situated time-based experiences, challenging hegemonic temporal frameworks and highlighting alternative ways of organizing time.

Building on my work in alternative knowledge and information systems, the Timelines Project connects to my research on open data as a critical civic practice. Its three-part methodology—exploration, datafication, and materialization—aims to generate multivocal historical narratives rooted in collective experience. By emphasizing data’s emotional and participatory dimensions, the project challenges the notion of data as neutral and advocates for an inclusive, community-based approach to civic knowledge.

Timeline workshops have generated data in collaboration with New Yorkers for Culture and Arts, the Latinx Arts Consortium of NYC, and Shinnecock Tribal members in Long Island.

The project’s first physical materialization will debut at BRIC’s Data through Design 2025 exhibition, featuring 450 time-data points as paper punch cards along a 30-ft gallery wall, inviting participants to re-order and contribute to this corpus of data.