Teen roving reporters from the New Museum hit the streets on Saturday, May 7 as part of the Festival of Ideas for the New City StreetFest. To see the first interview from this dynamic group of 7 City-as-School students, click here.

 

Check out the next interview below! Here’s what reporter Alissa Daskalova had to say about why she decided to interview the Truck Farm:

 

With so much going on at the festival it would’ve been a great time to be in two places at once. We couldn’t cover everything but luckily we found the Truck Farm. The Truck Farm is a film and food project by Wicked Delicate. It is a mini-farm in the back of a 1986 Dodge. It makes weekly deliveries of vegetables and greens in small amounts to 20 families and travels to schools to give students the opportunity to see food grow. This was definitely one of the coolest projects that we covered. It’s great to see people coming up with bizarre ideas to produce organic food and hopefully it will be a catalyst for other food growing projects.

 

All video, production, and reporting by G:Class partnership students.

 

 

Nuit Blanche / Flash:Light

 

On Saturday night of the Festival of Ideas On the evening of the StreetFest, the Bowery and its neighboring environs were blitzed with elegantly crafted light projection shows. Among a series of projects, Nuit Blanche New York’s Flash:Light installation lit up the facades of the New Museum and the Basilica at Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mulberry Street. For the event, Nuit Blanche invited a host of artists from the city and from across the globe to enact works on a particular swatch of the Manhattan landscape. These site-specific projects, which began as individual proposals, were modified in the weeks leading up to the Festival as the artists participated in collaborative workshops where mutual feedback and critique helped to shape the works into a more encompassing experience for both artists and viewers alike. The effort brought an immense, yet focused, collection of talent to bear on a single neighborhood.

 

The film, “Let Us Make Cake” marked the first time a video work has been projected onto the entire street façade of the New Museum. The piece, derived from footage of artists acting on scale models of the museum, was a collaboration by the following artists: Daniel Arsham, Acconci Studio, Federico Frum, Street Art (Elle, Tony Bones, Michael Alan, Jon Bocksel, Sarah Cooper, James Dyvbig, Aimee Lusty, Ian McGillivray, Scott Myers, Misha Tyutyunik), Read More, Chris Jordan, Ursula Scherrer and Claire Scoville, Z-Collective, Alyssa Taylor Wendt, Junko Miura, Mary Temple, SOFTlab, Ryan Uzilevsky, Brian O’Connell, Mia Pearlman, Adriana Varella, Dustin Yellin, Chakaia Booker, Olek, Terreform ONE, Jason Krugman / John Parker, Monika Wyndham, Jon Kessler, Light Harvest Studios & Z-Collective, and Marilyn Minter. Of these, some took the museum façade as a surface, producing images and atmospherics bounded by the canvas edge. Supergraphics, digital graffiti and vegetation patterns faded in and out of the jagged plane. Other works used the media of film (video?) to transform surface into volume, creating depth through illusion and populating the space with characters and figures.

 

In the context of a busy stretch of the Bowery, what was perhaps most notable about the scene was the manner in which passers-by slowed or came to a complete halt, participating in a collective spectatorship. There was, for a brief time, two parallel speeds–that of the traffic and that of the viewers who seemed to experience time in a much more deliberate fashion. One could imagine that the expertise developed in this project could be employed to construct an alternative New Year’s event, inverting the anticipation/momentary event pairing found in the Times Square ball drop with a show where the new year is ushered in with a creative recapitulation of content from the old.

 

Elsewhere, “The Equation of Time,” a work by multi-media artist Jeff Grantz, projected and animated a series of kaleidoscopic images which morphed from organic forms into a magnified view of the inner workings of a wristwatch. All of this was projected onto the façade of the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, creating a site-specific interaction between the permanence of architecture, the sinuous beauty of natural structures and the precision of watchmaking writ large through the medium of video. Accompanied by a haunting choral performance, the visual tableau slips between the figural and the abstract with the watch mechanisms often coming to resemble stained glass effects. This is an ambiguous billboard; its projection rooted in the specifics of the Basilica’s surface, with the content being very much removed. At the same time, the image cycles in the projection suggested that architecture has the capacity to continually reinvent itself–with collapse and destruction being placed within the same visual narrative.

 

Other events in and around the Basilica were equally captivating. The 3D premiere of Marco Brambilla’s “Civilization” was screened above the altar inside the Basilica, and the audience was handed out 3D glasses. The work, which re-interpreted Dante’s Inferno was a jarring and immersive experience made even more palpable by the somber tectonic context of its screening. A midnight organ program rounded out the evening’s collection of multi-media events, as contemporary musicians grappled with the complexities and nuances of an aged instrument–one of the last full pipe organs in New York. Time itself seemed to be the theme of the night.

 

Nuit Blanche / Flash:Light from C-Lab on Vimeo.

 

 

The Equation of Time, by Jeff Grantz from C-Lab on Vimeo.

 

 

- C-Lab

 

Teen roving reporters from the New Museum hit the streets on Saturday, May 7 as part of the Festival of Ideas for the New City StreetFest. This dynamic team of 7 students from the New Museum’s G:Class partnership program with City as School High School spent all day filming and interviewing both festival participants and visitors as part of a documentary they are creating on sustainability in New York City. Check out this teen reporter’s experience with the G.R.E.E.H.O.U.S.E. project!

 

Stay tuned for more interviews from our roving reporters later this week!

 

Anne-Katrin Spiess created the G.R.E.E.N.H.O.U.S.E (grounding retreat to enliven, energize, naturally heal and overcome undesired stress elements) project to emphasize the importance of being connected to nature. Her concerns are the threats to the world caused by modern
civilization. She treats the land as precious and introduces holistic healing remedies for
people and the Earth. She spends extended periods of time alone with nature without any
other worldly civilization. Her projects last from a few hours to a few days after which
everything used is returned back to its original place.

 

My experience with G.R.E.E.N.H.O.U.S.E was refreshing. It was nice to have
attention brought to personal problems rather than just the physical. I filled out a
questionnaire about my daily stresses and was then invited to sit and discuss the root of
my stress with the therapist. I was told that I had one of the lowest stress levels she had
seen that day and she wrote me a potion to manage what small traces of stress I had. The
potion is made of liquefied natural herbs and poured into test-tube like containers. So far
as I have been taking the potion I have not been feeling tension or stress related disease.

 

All video, production, and reporting by G:Class partnership students.

 

 

Festival of Ideas for the New City interviews John Fetterman, two-time mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, after the Mayoral Panel for The Sustainable City on May 6, 2011.

 

Festival of Ideas for the New City: Given its formal industrial past, it would seem that there would be significant environmental and health issues that affect Braddock – air quality, soil contamination, water contamination, etc. What, if anything, are you doing to address these issues, especially since you’re trying to attract new residents and industries?*

John Fetterman: They’re huge. We’re eight miles away from the most toxic area in America in Clairton, Pennsylvania — I encourage you to check it out. Eight miles away from Braddock is the most toxic area from the environmental protection standpoint’s survey from 2005. There’s no close second in fact, and that’s the home of US Steel’s coke plant. One out of every four children in our town has asthma. It’s poverty driven, unfortunately there’s a strong correlation with race and environmental social justice in towns like Braddock. And for me to suggest that I can figure that out in the next couple of years – these are large intractable problems and when you’ve got the most toxic area in the nation eight miles away and when the winds blow up what can we as a country tolerate, the citizens, the so-called least among us living under these kind of circumstances?

 

 

IdeasNYC: So it becomes a public policy issue?

JF: Yes, much higher than my pay-grade. We can’t have an adult conversation in this country, unfortunately, about the environment, because it quickly turns into, “You’re making this up, everything’s fine”, into “Really, everything’s fine?”, I mean have you seen the weather lately – about 300 people killed in tornadoes.

 

 

IdeasNYC: Do you think that what you have done in Braddock can be replicated elsewhere?*

JF: I don’t know. Something needs to be done for these kind of forgotten communities. There’s an extraordinarily large number of communities – maybe not quite as struggling as Braddock, but there’s a lot of places that aren’t going to attract, like you got the top tier: you got NY, Philly, Seattle you have these other cities, and then you have these much smaller places and towns and it’s like: what’s going to come and be there? What’s going to float their boat? That’s kind of like the public policy challenge that has really helped drive me. And that’s been the source of my interests from an educational standpoint and I’m very honored to put that into practice in my day-to-day.

 

 

IdeasNYC: What do you see the role of these smaller manufacturing cities playing in the U.S. in the next 10 or 20 years.*

JF: They’re not playing a really key role. They’re playing an increasingly diminishing role because they’re losing populations. You know, Detroit lost 25% of its population. Our town is losing at least 25% of its population. What’s going to change things? And that’s why I was involved in the Environmental Defense Fund’s campaign to help pass Cap and Trade. I really believe in Green Energy Revolution. There’s 180 tons of steel in a windmill and 4K/5K moving parts — that’s a lot of manufacturing jobs for people in this country. And if not that: what? What is going to help rebuild our middle class? What is going to be able help small manufacturing cities across the country that aren’t going to ever attract, or get the creative class? They’re not going to move a semi-conductor plant to McKeesport, Pennsylvania. It’s just never going to happen. What can sustain these cities from imploding on themselves?

 

 

IdeasNYC: That’s a rather bleak outlook, no?

JF: Anyone who ignores that there’s a bleak aspect to a  lot of this would just be sugarcoating it. I don’t. I’ve always come from a place of being very upfront and honest of the condition of a lot of these places because you know there’s a lot of…well, if 9 out of 10 people left and moved out of this town they’d have some serious conditions here. So I don’t ever want to be Pollyana or that: “Hey we’ll just get this knocked out in the next couple of years!” It’s a serious, long-term problem.

 

 

IdeasNYC: Have you experienced any blowback over the “yuppification” of Braddock?

JF: No, no! And that’s the thing: Braddock is gentrification-proof. Our challenge has consistently been abandonment and people leaving. And you know, if the average price of a home is around four-to-five thousand dollars, let’s say home prices triple: you’re still talking fifteen-thousand dollars for a single-family home. So you know we’re not in the market of pricing anybody out. Every structure that we kind of redid, we’ve rebuilt, we’ve re-imagined was a formerly abandoned space. So no-one’s ever been displaced in any of these efforts. I just think, again, I can’t aspire to platinum certified buildings, LEED-certification, you know, like I said in the presentation, I consider it a success if I keep a building out of a landfill.

 

 

IdeasNYC: Have you had further progress with your 2008 inquiry to bring the funds from the Recovery and Reinvestment Act to Braddock?

JF: Not really, unfortunately, the funds that have really helped bring Braddock along come from other sources and I have gone on record with my frustrations saying that they’ll give AIG $80 billion dollars over a couple weeks but they won’t build a new playground in our town. It’s that great line how the rich got socialism and the poor got capitalism, and we got demolished. I posed the question, ‘What would this country look like today if there was an equivalent level of intervention and concern to save the blue collar jobs as there is to save the white collar jobs? What would our country look like? What would Braddock look like? We’ll never know unfortunately. We got capitalism in the late 70′s and 80′s. They’ve socialized the money and prioritized the profits and that’s the big economic injustice of our era.

 

 

IdeasNYC: What did you find interesting about your follow mayors this evening at the panel?

JF: Well, Mayor Nutter, he’s the mayor of the state’s largest city and you have all the kind of issues that come with that. You have the mayor of Seattle who has a different set of problems – some are good problems to have and then you have Medellín, with violence. It was a great panel and I am honored to be on it. For a guy that’s coming from my level to be on a panel with the mayor of the largest city in the state, it’s quite a contrast.

 

*Denotes a reader question

 

 

 

Transportation is the life-blood of a city, regulating not only urban life and structure, but in many cases making those very things possible. As the Festival of Ideas for the New City re-imagined exciting urban possibilities, the Audi Urban Future Initiative provided a vital element – how new conceptions of mobility will drive the future of the New City.

 

The Audi Urban Future Initiative is a long-term commitment to a sustainable future for our cities. The special challenge, of course, is to understand this even as the way we live our lives changes at an incredible rate. What are the specific things that will shape our city lives? How will we go to work, visit friends, go see a movie, in a world where the demands on our time and resources grow while our materials and energy sources dwindle? Audi is seeking to find out not only how it will fit into that transformed world, but also what that world will look like – what its roads and buildings will be, and how they will function.

 

This exciting journey was flagged off on March 8, 2011 by the CEO of Audi, Rupert Stadler, and it arrived in New York this week, in a series of events curated by Stylepark. At the core of the Initiative were the five architectural visions of the future created for the Audi Urban Future Award, including Juergen Mayer’s fairytale of a city seen purely as a flow of information through an automobile’s dashboard. In Project New York, curated by Architizer, five emerging architects responded to these visions, applying their abstract ideas to New York in 2030 – the buildings in Turtle Bay exploited loopholes in zoning to add photovoltaic hats to their roofs, and underdeveloped pockets in Hudson Bay were given over to urban jungles. A more critical conversation took place at the Draw-Think-Tank, organized by Stylepark in collaboration with the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Here, 15 architects, thinkers, sociologists and anthropologists presented their manifestoes for the future of urban mobility – imagining transportation in a sentient city, and warning against technological optimism.

 

It’s been a very meaningful journey for the Audi Urban Future Initiative and Stylepark, and we can’t wait for next year’s edition!

 

- Audi Urban Future Initiative

 

 

 

 

Cities are the cauldron of transformation,” asserted Jonathon Rose, the discussion leader at The Festival of Ideas’ conference on The Heterogenous City, which included Jonathon Bowles, Suketa Mehta, Vito Acconci and Rosanne Haggerty. The discussion began with a deferent, and at times nostalgic, affirmation that New York City is indeed a creatively, ethnically and economically diverse city. However, the tone quickly shifted from celebratory to cautionary, as panelists debated mechanisms that could make heterogeneity sustainable. With a rising gap between rich and poor, which Rose deemed as “unhealthy, destabilizing” not to mention “immoral and unjust,” New York is becoming, according to Mehta, “one of the most grotesquely unequal American cities” where the average daily income of New York’s top economic tier is greater than the yearly salary of the city’s lowest-income group. Mehta argued against the common conception that for progress to happen, “the old city needs to be wiped out in order for the new city to be built,” thereby calling to mind the familiar colonialist rhetoric of modern gentrification. Rather than an outright resistance to gentrification and its effects on development, what people are asking for, Mehta argues, is coexistence, requiring the city to make room and facilitate new networks of solidarity. Such a city demands “generosity.”

 

Both Vitto Acconci and Rosanne Haggerty offered ideas for facilitating coexistence in order to maintain the heterogenous city. Acconci, an artist and practicing architect who recognizes that “unbuilt projects can be read as a theory of public space,” presented a series of proposed operations that would bend, stretch, morph, fold and mobilize urban space, reclaiming architecture as an activator of the public imagination, an opportunity to re-invent our relationship to and experience of the city, rather than a totalitarian project that encodes a dictated spatial behavior on its users. By challenging the boundary between public and private space, Acconci proposes the use of architecture to facilitate new interactions in the city. By forming small clusters of intimate space within larger public spaces, he argues, people do not need permission to speak, but can move and participate in civic life with a sense of agency.

 

Rosanne Haggerty approached the issue of maintaining a diverse city through the arguably more practical lens of housing. Haggerty’s organization Common Ground has transformed abandoned buildings in New York City, including The Times Square Hotel and more recently The Andrew’s Hotel on the Bowery, into mixed use housing opportunities for the homeless, low-income families as well as artists who need affordable work and living spaces. Haggerty poses the question: how do we get out of the way to let ground up innovation happen? She argues for a framework that is willing to risk fluidity for the sake of innovative solutions–more specifically, she calls for a re-evaluation of zoning codes in order to maximize the housing opportunities that the city has to offer. Safety and health, she argues, should be the only bases for zoning dictates. Beyond that, “why should we care” how people chose to organize housing? The “well-intentioned guidelines” of the system hinder growth, as our society’s value system arguably shifts away from “family centric” modes of operation. As Acconci argues, the “we,” or our imagining of the collective, is constantly shifting, and our systems of spatial organization need to facilitate innovative responses.

 

Beyond innovations in housing and public space, Bowles suggests that preserving heterogeneity requires strengthening New York’s transit system in order to facilitate connections between places and “unleash economic opportunities” in less developed neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. Such a move would allow people to visit places–such as Coney Island–that make New York City unique, yet will continue to be threatened by foreclosure and redevelopment if they remain largely disconnected from the city center. By establishing new networks that move and connect people, both physically and intangibly, the city can continue to hold on to its unique diversity and remain a place that attracts a continuous influx of people rather than compels them to make their homes elsewhere. By the same token, these same transit systems allow middle class workers who’ve been priced out of the city to move to places such as Philadelphia and continue to work in Manhattan. Efficiency, then, will still require an attenuated sense of place and a political will to carve out a space for the middle class alongside the immigrant population (without whom the city’s economy might collapse) and the globetrotting financiers who (at least for now) call the city their home.

 

- C-Lab

 

 

 

The discussion on the afternoon of Thursday, May 5 on the “networked city” ranged in tone from reverence at the scalar immensity of the networks that comprise the flow of global capital, (described by McKenzie Wark as being “so big as to be invisible”), to paranoia surrounding the potential both for network collapse (Anthony Townsend’s “bugs in the smart city”) and/or manipulation (Townsend’s  “surveillance society,” or Adam Greenfield’s spectrum of technological affect: helpful, disrespectful, downright exploitative), to sheer amusement at the possibilities opened up by imagination and the spaces of connectivity (Nathalie Jeremijenko’s prompt that each of us would benefit from picking a product and tracing its development from the factory to the store). Moderator Joseph Grima brought an architectural sensibility to the conversation, yet, to his credit, refused to deviate into the realm of asking what a networked city might actually look like. The morphological question set aside for the time being, the panelists engaged in a spirited political debate about the structure of networks and sought to locate the source of agency within this seemingly ambiguous space.

 

Ultimately, the question boiled down to the ambivalent relation between planning and play, a pair that cuts across the outmoded distinction between top-down and bottom-up action. Prompted perhaps by Wark’s evocation of the work of Constant Nieuwenhuys, the radical Situationist architect whose speculative New Babylon project (1959-1974) presented a vision of a ludic society; of individuals at play upon the vast surfaces of his new megacity. The concept of “play” as a source of agency was best suggested by two of Jeremijenko’s examples, the first being that sport is often the largest single determinant in the propagation and preservation of green space within cities. Her second example focused on the FAA’s recent classification of a “sport pilot’s license” to go along with recent developments in small-scale personal aviation. This play-driven change in code, or rather, the framework through which individuals have access to transportation choices (i.e. agency), has the power to change behaviors in the long term.

 

The latter example is key, as it represents a relation between the legislative/planning framework and the grassroots act. By the end of the New Babylon project, Constant had driven his ludic utopia into a dystopic state. This shift in attitude reflected Constant’s evolving belief that endless, unstructured play would ultimately destroy the city. In effect, individuals required a some form of organization with which to interact or respond. Townsend and Greenfield both set out to define such a structure for the networked city, namely, a set of procedures or juridical operations that would make the city more inclusive by making its processes more legible and by holding all parties accountable as much in their dealings in the “abstract” networked world as they would otherwise be in the “physical” world (a distinction, of course, to which none of those on the panel would likely ascribe). Only through such a continual updating of the rules of the game can the actions on the field come to resemble play rather than entropy. The deluge of unfiltered data (what Reinhold Martin calls, “the statistical sublime”) that accompanies the profusion of networks can become a smokescreen behind which to hide or an open-sourced playground for all. If Thursday’s panel is any indication, the networked city will likely be characterized by a tense, though vibrant political interplay between these extreme modes of operation.

 

- C-Lab

Come out and join us this Sunday for two great events!

 

 

The History & Future of the Bowery, 1pm

Bowery Alliance of Neighbors

Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, between Bleecker & Houston Sts.

Tickets: $8 (bowerypoetry.com / Ovation Tix: 866-811-4111)

 

Join us for a lively program of film, history, vintage Bowery songs and poetry, and a forum on current efforts to preserve and protect this remarkable street.  The city’s oldest thoroughfare, the Bowery has helped foster everything from tap dance, minstrelsy, vaudeville, Yiddish theater, Beat literature, abstract expressionism, and punk rock.  Poised for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, its historic sense of place is threatened by development. Sponsored by the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors & Two Bridges Neighborhood Council.

 

Speakers: Kent Barwick (former chair, Landmarks Preservation Commission);Simeon Bankoff (Ex Director, Historic Districts Council); Victor Papa (Two Bridges Neighborhood Council); Kerri Culhane (architectural historian); Eric Ferrara (author, The Bowery:  A History of Grit, Graft, & Grandeur).

 

Performers: Poor Baby Bree (chanteuse) & Franklin Bruno (pianist), Bob Holman (poet), John Campo & Tom Ryan (musicians, The VagabondVelonators)

 

 

 

The Urban Landscape in Cinematic Transformation, 2pm & 5pm

New American Cinema Group, Inc. and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

Millennium Film Workshop 66 East 4th Street, between Bowery & 2nd Avenue

Tickets – $8

 

An avant-garde film series interweaves three threads pertinent to the East Village, Chinatown, and Lower East Side: the urban landscape, subcultures that inhabit them, and changes over time.

 

This program includes Shirley Clarke’s Bridges-Go-Round, a classic masterpiece of undulating man-made urban constructions; Henry Hills’ Money, a meditation on the economic problems facing New York avant-garde artists; and Donna Cameron’sBroken Bridge (pictured), a collage of deconstructed hand-drawn images of the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, using Cameron’s own patented invention, paper emulsion. Also screening: Moving Images – The Film-Makers’ Cooperative Relocates by Joel Schlemowitz, Go! Go! Go! by Marie Menken, Eastside Summerby Rudolph Burckhardt, and Susie’s Ghost by Bill Brand.

Jeremyville

 

 

Saturday night at 8pm Nuit Blanche NY is hosting Flash:Light, Let Us Make Cake. Let Us Make Cake is a collaborative projection created expressly for the façade of the New Museum. Dozens of artists were asked to interact with scale models of the New Museum ranging in size from 11 inches to 11 feet, embracing the museum as both a canvas and vessel. The resulting footage is projection-mapped onto the Museum, marking the first time projection has been used to animate the entire 174-foot façade and rendering the artist’s hand monumental on this downtown landmark. End time TBD.

 

Participating Artists (in order of appearance): Daniel Arsham, Acconci Studio, Federico Frum, Street Art (Elle, Tony Bones, Michael Alan, Jon Bocksel, Sarah Cooper, James Dyvbig, Aimee Lusty, Ian McGillivray, Scott Myers, Misha Tyutyunik), Read More, Chris Jordan, Ursula Scherrer and Claire Scoville, Z Collective, Alyssa Taylor Wendt, Junko Miura, Mary Temple, SOFTlab, Ryan Uzilevsky, Brian O’Connell, Mia Pearlman, Adriana Varella, Dustin Yellin, Chakaia Booker, Olek, Terreform ONE, Jason Krugman / John Parker, Monika Wyndham, Jon Kessler, Light Harvest Studios, Marilyn Minter.

 

New Museum, 235 Bowery, btwn Stanton & Rivington Sts.; other locations include the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, and Mulberry Street btwn Houston & Prince Sts. (see www.flashlightnyc.org)
Click through for more information

Jeremyville

 

 

On Saturday from 6 – 10 pm and 10 – 11:30 pm, Bowery Arts & Science / City Lore with Local Projects will host the POEMobile: “A White Wing Brushing the Building”. This event will consist of poems engaging local communities in their native languages—Yiddish, Nuyoriqueno, Ukrainian and Chinese—that will be projected from a POEMobile onto buildings, including the New Museum and the Mayne Morphesus Building at Cooper Square with live performances. In collaboration with Flash:Light, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and art direction by Local Projects.

 

6 – 10pm at 308 Bowery, between Bleecker & Houston Sts.

10 – 11:30pm at Cooper Square at 7th St.

Click through for more information