I'm a fan of the urban planner Charles Landry and his concept of the creative city. I just started his book The Art of City Making and came across this passage:
Our sensory landscape is shrinking precisely at the moment when it should be broadening. Sensory manipulation is distancing us from our cities and we are losing our visceral knowledge of them. We have forgotten how to understand the smells of the city, to listen to its noises, to grasp the messages its look sends out and to be aware of its materials.
I was reminded of Landry when I came across a link to a contemporary art exhibition currently showing at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery in NYC. It's called You Are Here: Mapping the Psychogeography of New York City. According to the Pratt Manhattan website, the exhibition includes:
- a three-dimensional map of the lower Manhattan skyline made of a Jell-O-like material by Liz Hickokan
- an anxiety map of the five boroughs lit by sweat-powered batteries by Daniela Kostova and Olivia Robinson
- a “Loneliness Map” from Craigslist’s Missed Connections by Ingrid Burrington
- a scratch-and-sniff map of New Yorkers’ smell preferences by Nicola Twilley
- a cemetery map of Polish ancestors’ graves by Kim Baranowski
- an installation constructed from city ephemera by Pratt faculty member Robbin Ami Silverberg
- personal maps created from a call for submissions by the Hand Drawn Map Association including works by Tony Dowler, Will Haughery, Janine Nichols, Yumi Roth, Gowri Savoor, Rob Servo, Krista Shaffer, Kees Touw, Dean Valadez, and Shane Watt
- a series of mapped reflections on the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the ascendancy of the rock dove by Miranda Mahera
- a New York subway map in Urdu by Pakistani artist Asma Ahmed Shikoh
- photographs of a buzzing honeycomb map created by Liz Scranton’s bees
- the preliminary artwork for New Yorkistan, Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz’s post 9/11 cover for The New Yorker, and Kalman and Meyerowitz’s culinary subway map of the city
- Nina Katchadourian’s New York soundtrack, assembled from found segments of cassette tape
- Jeff Sisson’s ongoing Bodega List project
- a Happiness Map by Jane Hammond
- Bill Rankin’s maps of Not In My Back Yard-isms showcasing various geographies of community and exclusion
- a diptych of memory maps by Dahlia Elsayed
I don't know about you, but I'm thinking this exhibition is probably chock-a-block with sensory experience. I can't make it to New York before the exhibition closes on November 6, but I'm hoping an NY reader might check it out and report back. Do you come away with a deeper, more visceral understanding of the city? And which pieces are most successful? In the meantime, the rest of you can find more description and some photographs at UrbanOmnibus.