Gallery / Featured Work / New York A/V
From south to north, sunrise to sunset, over the week of May 30th through
June 5th of this year, an audio-video mapping of the city was presented along
the entire length of Manhattan. A container inscribed with information about
the city and pulled by a truck traveled the length of the line Broadway Street
creates up the island, as a cross section through the city and a cross section
through time. This moving installation, which inhabited the island, was grounded
each day of the seven-day cycle at a different park or square along the trajectory
of Broadway, through the city, allowing its inhabitants in passing to enter
and experience a day in the history of the city four years ago, when the footage
viewed inside was collected.
This inhabitable document merges the language of the moving image and the
language of drawing as a way of reading, mapping, and presenting a city. It
challenges traditional means of representation by allowing the passerby to
enter, view, and become part of the document and in the process to become
aware of their daily patterns of movement and interaction with the physical
and the ephemeral characteristics of the city.
The activities and interactions of this city four years ago are happening
and have happened again and again, day-by-day in the routine of the city yet
they are also different, new and still changing. What was collected can only
happen once yet it reveals patterns about the city at many scales that are
repeated in time. Changes in the speed of the footage when played and viewed
are like changes of scale in a drawing. These changes allow us to perceive
different conditions of the city individually and also in relationship to
each other. Reinserting this collected activity into the city four years later
allowed the inhabitants to look afresh at their city’s ephemeral and
physical existence and to experience and understand the large and small changes
of a place that is every minute in transformation. For the group involved
in presenting the footage the experience was as if literally within a section
cut. As the city was traversed and experienced, seven distinct areas were
inhabited at each of the seven parks, each day - each zone with their different
populations, cultures, and activities.
NY AV was acquired by the New York Historical Society in 2002 as the first
document of this kind. It was presented at Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence
and published in INTIMACY, a publication by Mandragora as part of the International
Festival for Architecture in Video in 2003.
Its trajectory on Broadway as it maps the city once more yet present the
footage from four years past is listed below. The installation was accessible
from sunrise to sunset for seven days at these locations on Broadway Street:
Monday May 30th – Bowling Green (Battery Pl.-Morris St.)
Tuesday May 31st – Union Square (17th St.)
Wednesday June 1st – Dante Park (63rd St.)
Thursday June 2nd – Straus Square (106th St.)
Friday June 3rd – Montefiore Square (138th St.)
Saturday June 4th – Mitchel Square (166th - 168th St.)
Sunday June 5th – Fort Tryon Park (Dyckman St.)
NY AV was designed by Clemson University Architecture professors Martha Skinner and Douglas Hecker. The NY AV Map project has been funded by Clemson University: Clemson Advancement Foundation, McMahan Fund for Excellence, Innovation Fund, and Research Grant. It was initiated with funds from the University of Michigan’s Discretionary Fund.
For more information about NY AV contact:
Martha Skinner marthas@clemson.edu
Douglas Hecker dhecker@clemson.edu