The Urban Jackpot
An Art Installation and a Research Tool: Circulating Urban Stories
The Urban Jackpot is an installation that blends art and research. It lets citizens uncover local urban stories and contribute their own, enabling strangers who haven’t met to converse about the city and exchange urban stories.
The Urban Jackpot features a lightweight application embedded in a refurbished vintage slot machine fitted with a digital interface. Participants pull the lever to draw a photo-story card from a pool of stories and images submitted by Copenhagen residents via our Urban Belonging app. Participants are then prompted to record their own stories through the headset.
As a travelling installation, deployed in different locations, the Urban Jackpot is designed to circulate stories across neighborhoods and urban publics. Research data often remains an intangible, cloud‑based artifact that participants seldom re‑encounter. Urban Jackpot is a deliberately tactile exercise in data physicalization that reimagines data not as a distant abstraction but as something we can touch, feel, play with, and encounter.
The Urban Jackpot is designed and built by Arshia Eghbali, with the assistance of David Broomham.
The Urban Jackpot is part of the larger Urban Listening Toolkit developed by David Broomham, Arshia Eghbali, Martin Trandberg Jensen, and Anders Koed Madsen.
The Urban Jackpot is co-funded by the European Union, through the CULTIGEN (2024-2028) project, and Aalborg University.
Version 1.0 was deployed in June 2026, at Karens Minde Kulturhus, as part of the SV Festival in Sydhavn, Copenhagen.
