In NY A/V, an audio and video recording of New York City, we took 625 stationary video shots over seven days zooming north on Broadway Street. As if CAT scans of the city, these numerous video shots were connected into one continuous zoom. The film allows us to get inside and understand the city as a physical entity. Broadway Street deviates from Manhattan’s grid while traversing the entire island and functions like the familiar architectural drawing technique, the section-cut. Instead of looking into the cut perpendicular to its length as one would on a conventional section-cut drawing, we inhabit and travel this line.
In the summer of 2001, a series of stationary audio/video takes zooming north on Manhattan was collected by walking the length of Broadway on the island during the period of a week. Four years later, a container marked with information about the city, pulled by a truck and encapsulated with the information collected as sounds and moving images traveled the same trajectory as a cross-section through the city and through time. Grounded each day of the seven-day cycle at a different park along the length of Broadway, the container allowed the everyday inhabitants of the city, to enter and experience a day in the history of the city. In this process, the passerby interacted, read, added, altered — actively participating in the reading and recording of their city. This document expands traditional means of representation by allowing the inhabitants of the city to actively become aware of their ever changing environment. This study, which merges the vocabularies of drawing and of moving image to address time in the study of place is drawn by the movement of the investigators’ bodies/camera as if giant instruments with which to measure, locate, inscribe and represent the city. The representation is temporal, inhabitable and interactive.
MOST NOTABLE ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF NY A/V:
2012 Exhibited at Asheville Art Museum – New Media Gallery Selected as one of the inaugural projects for the New Gallery
2009-11 Exhibited as part of the Installations by Architects traveling exhibit at: Waterloo University (Cambridge, Ontario), AHO (Oslo), Haus for Architektur (Graz, Austria), McGill University (Montreal, Québec), University Oregon (Eugene, Oregon), Parsons University (New York City), Laval University (Québec), University of Maryland (College Park, Maryland), University of Texas at Austin (Austin, Texas), Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia).
2009 Installations by Architects, Princeton Architectural (Princeton Architectural Press) in Public Space chapter
2006 Honorable Mention- ID Magazine 52nd Annual Design Review
2006 Featured in Journal of Architectural Education
2005 Traveled the length of Broadway Street as a moving installation with support from the New York City Parks Department
2005 Exhibited at Universita degli Studi di Firenze, Facolta di Architettura and iMage. Florence Italy
2002 The NY Historical Society acquires a version of NY A/V Map for their collections as the first document of this kind
Collection of Footage: The University of Michigan students: Huey-Ru Chang, J.T. Krisnamurti Lumenta, Christopher Christian, David Rhose, Jule Tsai, Kathryn Dobija, Neil Meredith, Koonseo Ahn
Footage Editing: Clemson University students: Daniel Culberston, Matthew Warner
Construction of Container: Doug Hecker and Clemson University Students: Chris Altman, John Babcock, Matthew Belt, Eric Bennett, Robert Brown, Tiffany Cain, Katrina Cobb, Yeul Ho Choi, Lisa Davenport, Aidan Doyle, Craig Fleming, Julie Garst, Brandon Gerhke, Hunter Hanahan, Sabrena Jeter, Trey Lee, Gerald Mackey, Clinton Menefee, Sean Murphy, Danielle Nemec, Heather Ramsey, Ashley Shelton, Kenton Simon, Hal Shute, Elizabeth Sumner, Glenn Timmons, Cleveland Walker. Steelwork: Carlos Skinner
Installation: Brandon Benzing, Joe Delaney, Natalie Gualy, Cliff Hammonds, Doug Hecker, Sean Hyland, Nick Kunzi, Thad Rhoden, Lindsey Sabo, Peyton Shumate, Michael Stopka
Technical support and equipment: Video Studio – The University of Michigan / Communications Center- Clemson University / Multimedia Authoring, Teaching and Research Facility – Clemson University / Emery A. Gunnin Architecture Library – Clemson University
Funding: Discretionary Fund, The University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, Michigan / Research Grant, Clemson University – Clemson, South Carolina / Innovation Fund, Clemson University – Clemson, South Carolina / McMahan Fund for Excellence, Clemson University – Clemson, South Carolina / The Clemson Advancement Foundation for Design + Building, Clemson University – Clemson, South Carolina