Summer tends fuel omnivorous thinking. Two seemingly disconnected things came together for me as thought that I would love to see come to life. The main thought comes from my involvement over the last year in the Community Board 2's Omnibus Committee related to the demolition and redevelopment of St. Vincent's Hospital - a huge and highly politically charged redevelopment project of Greenwich Village that has many people fearing the end of the city they remember and love.
Second thought came from watching a rerun of Knocked Up. In the movie
the brotherhood of burnouts scheme to start there own online version of
MrSkin.com. The site gives users access to a comprehensive archive of nude scenes search-able by actor names.
OK....how are these connected? It is all about how we rebuild and how we see our relationship to time and place. Our quickness to tear down and start over comes because we forget the stories that live in the buildings and environment around us. How they have shaped what we do and believe. We are losing a sense of the narrative of urban (and suburban) environments because we don't remember and have disconnected to what the architecture means to us. It is easier to bulldoze instead of reuse if we don't connect to the historical narrative inherent in these structures. Perhaps the intersection of analog and digital can help to keep the connection going and help inform better how we grow the story going forward.
These buildings and locations live on film in the history of cinema. Thousands and thousands of locations that were chosen and immortalized in the history of film. Perhaps geo-tagging (a la Mr. Skin) the hundreds/thousands of scenes to the geographic map would grow this perception of this relationship between place and identity in the minds of people. The mundane locations that we walk by day after day have been the context and backdrop for so many films. Slices of time and evolving narrative.
The problem with maps is that we tend to think of them as simply tied only to the present. The reality is that they are obsolete the moment they are published. The broader idea of maps as a series of layers by which we experience place - past, present, future - virtual is far more powerful in plotting the relationship between space and identity. The evolution of technology seems ripe to bridge this gap.
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