The Unstill Life:
An Object-Based Portrait of the Lower East Side Now
"I'm interested in everyday objects as carriers of moods and images, associations, and fantasies. The stories that they tell are not stated overtly, but are inferred." - Konstantin Grcic (1965- )
The Unstill Life is an interactive web-art project proposed by Dylan Gauthier, Rory Solomon and Paula Zaslavsky for the consideration of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum's 2007 Digital Artist in Residence Project.
Project Proposal
The Lower East Side has historically been a first stop for immigrants coming to America. The neighborhood provided homes, jobs, opportunities to learn, shopping destinations and an ever-shifting community to new arrivals. This dynamic history has woven itself through the area as alternating patterns of production and consumption, arrival and departure, new and old. Today, the Lower East Side remains a destination for transplants to New York City. Some come from Guangdong province in China, others from villages in Puerto Rico, still others from the American heartland. What they have in common is the drastic personal changes they all experience upon arrival on the LES and the drastic alterations that they themselves make to the un-still life of the neighborhood.
This project aims to collaboratively create a dynamic portrait of the Lower East Side today through the collection of visual autobiographies. We will access a broad cross-section of the people who live, work, and study in the neighborhood – as well as those who visit it – and invite them to contribute photographs of their objects to an online object catalog.
Objects paint an intimate picture without being invasive. They are central to our identities in contemporary society. In many ways, we are what we own. As PopArt photographer Neil Winokur says, "one's identity and one's possessions are synonymous." Objects were the subjects of the earliest photographic experiments. In the 1820s, the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce used a process he called "sun writing" to create the first permanent photographic images. His process required a many-hour-long exposure time. It could only be used to photograph buildings and inanimate objects, the perfect still life sitters.
In a polyglot society like that of the Lower East Side, objects are a basic unit of communication. People from disparate groups who may never understand even a word of each other's languages can nonetheless communicate fluently in the language of potatoes, coffee, dollars and cents, clothing, keys, and packages. The photographs that we will collect will capture and document this language in a way that all members of the community can understand – and in a way that will provide a fascinating opportunity to understand this community for those from elsewhere.
Just as the Tenement Museum tells the stories of Lower East Side's past through objects at 97 Orchard Street, we propose to create an online museum of contemporary objects to tell the stories of the neighborhood today. We will provide analytical tools for this catalog in the form of several graphical visualizations, allowing visitors to the site to explore this rich collection of images, ask questions, and discover emergent properties of the object library. We will thus contribute to the presentation and interpretation of the variety of immigrant and migrant experiences on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Data collection and project participants
We will collect photographs and associated text in several distinct ways, allowing us to reach out to a variety of people on the Lower East Side. Coinciding with the beta launch of the website, we will put up stickers and posters around the neighborhood asking people to send photos of objects to The Unstill Life library from their camera-phones. People will be able to claim their camera-phone photos and add descriptive text and tags by logging into the website.
The Unstill Life website will also have the capacity to accept direct uploads of photographs. We will screen-print posters to hang advertising participation.
Additionally, we will insure participation in the project by the neighborhood's international transplants by visiting English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes on the Lower East Side. We will work with teachers of ESOL at PS188 (at Houston Avenue & Avenue D), The Hamilton-Madison Community Center (at Madison Street & Olive Street), Borough of Manhattan Community College (various Lower East Side locations) and any interested Shared Journeys participants from the Museum. Students will be prepared by their teachers before our visits. When we come to a class, we will set up an in-classroom photo studio to photograph objects that students bring in on a designated Bring Your Objects to Class Day. At the conclusion of the classroom activity, we will have several cameras for loan that interested students can borrow to photograph more objects from their lives. For the beta phase of the project, we will involve at least 60 students in order to create a database of 600 + objects.
Visualizations
When a user navigates to The Unstill Life website, they will encounter a single randomly-selected image from the object library with its accompanying text. The image will change with each visit or page refresh. Beneath the image, the user will find graphic navigation elements to take him or her to views of this object in the context of the entire library viewed as a Text Cloud, an Approximated Use Floor Plan or on a Geographic Flow Map.
A text-based "cloud" visualization will show all the objects in the database organized by their tags. A tag is any word associated with an object. Tags can be created from elements of the "What is this object?" answer provided by participants or from any of the other data gathered about the object or its associated person. In the Text Cloud, tags will appear in a visual swarm larger and smaller depending on how many times they appear in The Unstill Life library. Clicking on a tag in the Cloud will present a tiled image arrangement of all the objects in the library that share that tag.
Another way to view the library will be as small (approximately 10 by 10 pixel) thumbnail images organized on a dynamically generated floor plan, representative of a Lower East Side tenement. The rough guidelines for the floor plan will be determined by us, but the relative sizes and orientations of rooms will be derived from the actual object photos currently in the library. Building on Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg's Apartment (2001), our application will map the library's objects to rooms in a home. Each room will represent a function category (clothing, food, work, transportation, family, religion, health & exercise, play, education, other). Based on the object's name, an algorithm will decide which function category it will fall into. Thumbnails will be "placed" into the room that corresponds to the object's category (food - kitchen, other - fire escape, etc.). Relative room sizes will then be determined by how many objects are currently placed in that room. A glance at this view would show the end-user the relative presence of objects in the database for each category.
This view will be highly interactive. As the user rolls the mouse over this visualization, thumbnail image he or she passes over will be magnified. When a user clicks on an image, it will bring up a window showing the full-sized image and associated text. Users will be able to generate a view of their own objects and their approximated uses. They will be able to either download the image or send it to friends.
Where do the people come from?
Another way to view this database will be as an interactive map of the world as it flows into and out of the Lower East Side through people and objects. The large-scale view will be of a map of the world that shows where all the people and objects in the database come from as arrows flowing into the LES. Users will be able to click on individual arrows to see the corresponding person or object details.
We will also supplement the anecdotal findings of our library with additional research using established data sources such as the US Census. An annotated bibliography will be offered as a link on the website. Information about production and manufacturing on the Lower East Side, wages in places where objects are manufactured and any other additional information that we find will be available as rollover text on the geographic flow view.
Users will be able to generate a view of their own objects as they flow into and out of the Lower East Side and either download the image or send it to friends.
This view will create a composite image of all the objects associated with a single person in The Unstill Life library. Images of all an individuals objects will appear partially transparent one on top of the other to create an object-portrait of one of the contributors.
Users will be able to download this unique generated digital art piece or email it to friends.
Users will be able to manipulate any of the views by selecting different year ranges, selecting which object functions to show and/or showing all the objects associated with a particular user or a particular NYC neighborhood or a particular country of origin. In this way, end users will be able to create their own views of The Unstill Life library.
From the single-object view, the end user will be able to click to open the geographic flow, the function tree or the collection of objects that share its tag. Navigation elements will also always be present to allow the user to switch views.
Additional Elements
Each image in the library will have a publicly accessible comments field. End-users will be able to post any of their own associations with the objects in our library. This commenting power will initiate a cross-cultural exchange centered on solving the problems of daily existence in New York City. Comments will be visible blog-style in the single object view.
As we work on The Unstill Life, we will document our collaboration and our research process in an on-line blog. The blog will include notes on our experiences doing outreach with potential participants, our own musings on objects and their flows through the Lower East Side, and related readings and links.
Implementation Specifications
We will implement all of the data collection logic with a web interface using PHP and connecting to a MySQL database. We will implement an SQL data model to store information about participants and object photos. Our estimate for the beta phase of the project is to collect approximately 600 photos, and after launch, depending on the project's popularity, approximately 600 more. At roughly 250KB per photo, this equates to 300MB of storage space on the server, which should be very manageable. However, if database server space becomes a constraint, we have explored the possibility of registering a Flickr Pro account (~$25) and interfacing with this for photo storage via Flickr's open API.
Our visualization components will be implemented in Flash or Processing (a Java-based graphical programming tool).
W3C accessibility
We will make this project's website fully accessible by complying with the W3C's "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines". For example, we will populate the ALT attribute of each image in the library with any information that the user has entered about the object in the image. On Geographic Flow Maps and the Approximated Use Floor Plan, we will use that same user-input text for all hotspots. Generated arrows on the Map and rooms on the Floor Plan will also have summary text. All visual navigation elements will have text attributes. A mouse-less user will be able to use the TAB key to navigate.
Bibliography
Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. University of Indiana Press. Bloomington IN. 1985.
Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. Oxford University Press. New York, NY. 1996. Pages 770-771.
Harvard University Art Museums. "Busch-Reisinger Museum Hosts Everyday Objects from Famed German Writer." Press Release. 2002.
http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/press/released2002/goethe.html
Obsessive Consumption. Ongoing. http://obsessiveconsumption.com/
Redmon, David. Mardi Gras Made In China. Film. 2005. http://www.mardigrasmadeinchina.com/
Rivoli, Pietra. The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Hoboken NJ. 2005.
Walczak, Marek & Wattenberg, Martin. Apartment. New York, NY. 2001. http://mw2mw.com/4
Weskamp, Marcos. Newsmap. Tokyo, Japan. 2004. http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/
Winokur, Neil. Everyday Things. Smithsonian. Washington DC. 1994.