The Big Board

The Big Board started its life as a pandemic dashboard: a Jekyll-powered website aimed at displaying coronavirus data during what we thought were the darkest days of the pandemic. A cron job ran a script every half hour, pulling data from the Johns Hopkins real-time dashboard of COVID-19 cases and deaths.

Shortly thereafter, as the days got darker, I pivoted to showing coronavirus deaths in context, as compared to other causes of death worldwide. I modified the cron job to pair COVID deaths with data about other causes of death from the Global Burden of Disease Study, timed to that point in the calendar year. With zero confirmed COVID deaths on January 1, the scoreboard would have started on an equal playing field.

By halftime in July, COVID-19 was on track to kill more people in 2020 than malaria, suicide or AIDS. By mid-August it had knocked Tuberculosis out of the top nine, making it the deadliest infectious disease on Earth. It was around that time that I started calling it the “Big Board of Death”, and building a physical manifestation of it using a combination of protoboards, custom PCBs and 192 alphanumeric display modules.

On January 1, 2021, I completed the piece, and exhibited it in the window of my apartment in Brooklyn for several weeks. By that time, COVID had ended the year in position five: killing more people than diabetes, liver disease and kidney failure.

I’ll admit: visualizing this loss of life as a scoreboard could be seen as insensitive. I’ll say that in the end it came from a place of anger. As the disease raged and our president lied and refused to take action, I got mad. The object was a polemic, a rant in hardware form.

Watching the death toll rise over the year would normally be cause for sadness. Instead, for me, it induced rage. With half the country pretending it wasn’t real, The Big Board now felt for me like a pissed-off reassertion of reality: “Look at the scoreboard, motherfucker. Now put on your mask.”

“The Big Board”, 2020. 3D printed parts, Python code, custom electronics.