Found Around NYC...

Found: Blog Study

This wasn't found in NYC, but it was found while I was in NYC.  I did a study on bloggers as part of my Media Study graduate class in new media theory (I had to start a blog as part of a project in a new new media class, too).  It could have been a thesis and I'm working on the final form in Google docs to post and I'll put a link here when I do.  For now, you can wade through the smaller posts starting here as I'm posting it in ten parts on my other blog.

We are thinking of ourselves differently in the new mediascape.  MIT is starting a new media lab project to create an improved human being, Nick Carr notes, using the idea and logo of h2.0 which is pretty catchy.

What is happening to us on this bridge between real and virtual as we navigate both worlds will be interesting and exciting.  We will be changed by this environment that is moving at mach speed.  When I studied new media, media theory and what was happening in the blogs, especially female blogs, there was very little research out there.  I hope mine contributes something.

Stop and Hear the Music...

It wasn't until my second year here that I discovered the joy of riding bikes in Central Park.  I had to stop, get off the bike and settle in on a park bench and listen to this group playing near the entrance of Central Park South along the Fifth Avenue side.

This has been one of the joys of living here -- delighting in the sheer talent that is on display everywhere.

I don't know which was the best this day... riding the bike when the trees were blooming and the warm air was hitting my cheeks or the music that I took the time to stop and enjoy.

How Has 9/11 Changed Us?

This drawing, left, is the main illustration for the provocative wall of simple drawings entitled "What Happened to Us?" by Dan Perjovschi on view at the Museum of Modern Art May 2 - August 27th.

It is a wonderful project to make you be taken in and give some thought to what the artist is saying about how we have changed since 9/11.

We have changed but how, exactly is something we can now begin to come to terms with, now nearly six years later. 

I put this up after the last post on the Unintended Memorial (my word for it) because these go hand-in-hand.  Six years later there isn't much really to see at WTC, the site of the horreur. We collectively watched the event ad nauseum on cable at the time and for days thereafter.  Now the impact  of the event is greater than the victims, is greater than the ruined site, is greater than the one city that suffered.

Perjovschi created the work on the site and interacted with viewers.  The fact that he is Romanian might even give him a wider perspective on how it has changed us than we ourselves can even grasp.  Although his work seems simple - just line drawings - the most effective arstists are those that make you think about things.

Instead of seeing the hole-in-the-ground site, instead of visiting the Unitended Memorial, you might be better off visiting this art piece (if you can't go and see bunch of drawings on the huge wall, see them online - pdf) and thinking about what it has to say about how this event has changed us.  All of us.

The Unintended Memorial...

This sculpture, left, might come to be the most appreciated memorial to the 9/11 tragedy.  Pilgrimage paths and visuals keep  memories alive and there just isn't much to feel part of at the 9/11 site, visually speaking.

The Memorial to the victims of the Oklahoma City Murrah building was up fairly quickly after the event. It has empty chairs to represent victims.  It is at street level.  It has a way of marking the event and has easy access for tourists. By the time the Word Trade Center memorial is built, memories might have faded.  Hence, this sculpture in Battery Park might be the default tangible to mark the event.  It symbolizes something that survived.  What survived and how we are changed is something to contemplate about 9/11.

For three decades this sculpture by artist Fritz Koenig stood in the Plaza of the World Trade Center. Damaged on 9/11, it has been moved to the Battery Park esplanade and an eternal flame was lit on the first year anniversary of 9/11 adjacent to the sculpture. 

Like the cyclone memorial fence surrounding the OKC site at  the first large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. Soil, the original fencing surrounding the WTC had ribbons, personal photos, notes, dried flowers and teddy bears.  Now the cyclone fence at the WTC is santized, formalized and structuredas shown in the photo, right.

How something makes its way into our public psyche and becomes our collective pattern of memory might now be more digital than real.  The sculpture, above, is more suited to digital sharing and the news reals from that day are more embedded in our historical memories than any physical place might be.

Just something to think about.

Spring Blooms and The Apple...

What a gorgeous day in Manhattan!!!  Everything bloomed all at once and we went from winter to spring in one week.

I had to stop and take this shot on my way to the apple store, which you can see as the 32-foot glass cube on GM Plaza right behind the red tulips.

The new Apple Box, which demarks the huge space down under ground, accessible via a circular stairway and elevator right on the Fifth Avenue side of the box, is redefining NYC.  It is open 24/7/365, just like our lives online are defined by being always on and available.  What I like best about the exterior design is its metaphor of our lives lived transparently and no longer bound by concrete and it is a doorway into another interior space.

A third Apple store is being planned in Manhattan in the Meatpacking District.  The Fifth Avenue Flagship store which opened a year ago May 18, followed the 2002 SoHo store. Apple is now the highest volume-per-square-foot retailer in the US.  In the second quarter of FY 2007, Apple's sales grew by 36%, outpacing the rest of the industry by three times, according to May 7th Resident magazine's cover story.

And the i-Phone isn't even for sale yet.  Apple's out of the box.

My other photos of the Apple Box are here.

Central Park in Bloom...

Two weeks ago I had to take photos in Central Park on an assignment.  There were only daffodils blooming.  There wasn't a leave sprouting on a tree and the buds were barely visible.  It was a drizzly, 40 degree day and I had to try to find pictures that looked like Spring in Houston. 

Today the park was in full bloom.  Last week the first warm weather arrived and people were out in full force in the park.  What a relief and release valve this urban park is for these urban dwellers.  Then everything bloomed, seemingly all at once.

Most of the comments I heard during the week were utterances of amazement of how spring just popped out in one bloomin' week, in one fell swoop.  It seems so true.  The tulips started to open on Park Avenue and the trees broke into blossom and all during this week, too, I was shooting on assignment. 

I was blooming, too.

The Grass is Always Greener...

I came across an article recently about the statistical increase in young (white) children under 5 in Manhattan.

My children were raised with grass backyards and a stream over the backfence.  They caught grasshoppers, crawdads and ran barefoot and tumbled with the dog down green slopes.

I would think children might feel like caged animals with only this rubber-upon-cement place to play, surrounded by jail-bar fencing. That is just my view from the other side, though.   Hmmmm.  My feet touch dirt and grass rarely now.  I wonder how often city children have their feet hit anything natural.  How does this mold a child?

Wayfinding & Subways...

Having ridden subways in Paris and London at different times over the years before moving to NYC, I have to say that they are not easily mapped and navigable.  Architecturally, signage-wise, it is not easy to understand the system as it is currently mapped.  I can't even read the little wallet-sized cards with the tee-niny writing.  The signage in the subway itself isn't any easier.  You would think that a city that relies on tourism and has a ton of smart business people might decide to make this easier (or the taxi business has conspired to keep it all hazy). I'm glad that someone cares to revamp the subway map.  By the time he finishes, I'll be outa here.

That someone is Eddie Jabbour, who says, “... it takes a cryptic archaeologist to read this one. It’s like the Rosetta Stone.”  Yep.

On other paths, my nearly grown-up son is contributing to this space under the name "The Transient."  That was his word of the year for 2005. He has a good eye and I welcome his visual attention to this space and to this (still, to us)  interesting unmined territory.  Four eyes will be finding items of interest.

Wayfinding.  An interesting subject.

Oh, Lola...

Well, I sat with a lady on a park bench in front of the boating pond and we discussed why Lola hasn't hatched any eggs.  Lola's nest is above the middle window at the top floor of this Fifth Avenue residence building facing onto Central Park.  Lola and her mate, Pale Male, are the famous red-tailed hawks, the breed that mates for life.  Lola has not had eggs hatch out for a few years.

The woman thinks - and perhaps it is a very good point - that there is a metal frame device above the window and because of this the nest isn't resting on a solid surface.  Instead, it is poised above the shelf and air can circulate below the nest.  Possibly this is why the eggs can't be kept warm and develop as they should.

The telescopes were positioned just so and Pale Male could be seen inside the nest.

A Fly on The Wall...

Art, good art, makes you think.  It stops you or stays in your mind long after you have seen it.

This fly art was plastered along the street over other poster advertisements.  I took the picture because it was unexpected and quite interesting.

It made me think afterwards about the metaphor of the fly on the wall, being able to overhear and see things that we aren't directly participants in -- the unseen observer.

This art had no words, no signature.  The ephemeral fly that makes one wonder why.