Psychogeographique de NYC is heavily inspired by Guy Debord's and Asger Jorn's The Naked City. The Naked City is an illustrated map of Paris that showed arrows, which represents suggested walking paths, and neighborhoods important to the artists. Most Parisian neighborhoods were omitted, so the map consists of fragments. Another "map" that inspired my work, is a subway map designed by Erin Jang for her 3 year old nephew. She managed to simplify and distill the complexity of the New York City subway map. Like The Naked City, most of the actual map is missing, yet there is still a sense of place.
The Naked City, and to lesser extent the child's subway map, are examples of psychogeography, a kind of creative mapping practice of one's urban environment. In The Guide To Urban Geography by Guy Debord, Debord noncommittally defines psychogeography as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the greographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
I find the practice of psychogeography intriguing because it is exactly how I create my mental/emotional map of New York City, a place where I have worked, played, and lived for most of my life. The urban environment of New York City and I are two entities, but I cannot say that I am fully separate from NYC. The city has specific effects on my emotions and behavior. For example, if I'm walking through Midtown, I would feel solemn because most often I would find myself surrounded by empty streets and imposing office buildings. If I'm walking through Williamsburg on a Saturday evening, I would feel a quiet, anxious excitement. Williamsburg is mostly quiet residential areas or desolate industrial parks, but once in awhile, the milieu is interrupted by the hottest new bar or restaurant, or groups of people looking for the hidden hot spots.
Associated with psychogeography, is the theory of dérive, or drift. In a dérive, participants wander about the city without their usual goals of errands and appointments. The only aim is to observe and be drawn into the psychogeographic attractions and encounters of the city. The idea of the dérive resonates with me, because it was one of the ways that I wandered the city. While reading Theory of the Dérive, also by Guy Debord, I was reminded how one day, I spent my lunch hour wandering around the neighborhood of SoHo (South of Houston St.). I remember being frantic as I tried to make my way through the crowds on Broadway. I was also overstimulated due to the hustle and bustle of shoppers entering and leaving the department stores that avenue. Then there were feelings of calm and community just a few yards east. These side streets were lined with independent boutiques that invited the conscientious consumer and cozy cafés with hidden menus for returning customers.
So, for this project, I wanted to map my personal psychogeography as well as the paths of dérive. I realized, that the way I drifted through the city was orientated towards the NYC subway system. My map would loosely follow the different train routes.
However, it would've been impractical and irrelevant to map all the streets and the subway lines. Like The Naked City, I would have to leave out large sections of New York City. Certain elements would have to be hidden for the sake of clarity and expression. In addition, I wanted to tell a non-linear, fragmented story of my life in the city. I would have to create a map that served my interests of psychogeography and story telling.
In The Power of Maps, Denis Wood and John Fels posited that all maps work and are useful by serving the interests of either the mapmaker or the mapmaker's intended audience. Maps were subjective, even if they were created using objective methods. The decision to use one map projection over another, to choose maps that favor scale or conformality, reveals biases. Objects are distorted when they are mapped. There is no such thing as a perfect corresspondence between the object and its mapping. My interests in making the map was to make available my psychogeographical images of NYC and to describe what my life in NYC is like. For this project, I decided to be more honest about what I selected and what I have distorted in ordered to accomplish my goals for mapping NYC.
I looked to psychogeography and dérive to guide me in why I mapped the things I did. For selecting what exactly to map, I was inspired by Wood's maps of Boylan Heights, a Raleigh neighborhood in North Carolina. I wanted to trace the paths, or as Kevin Lynch describes in The Image of the City, "channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves". I also wanted to map the nodes of activity which corresponded to subway stops. For example several nodes that I frequent, such as the NYU campus and St. Mark's Place surround the 8th Street station.
For the map, I decided to illustrate the map by hand (in homage to The Naked City) using ink on vellum. Vellum was chosen because of its texture and look of transparency. I chose to draw using nibbed pens because of the quality of the lines they produced.
The first few maps I drew had accurate scale and conformality. Landmarks and nodes were either marked with the actual name of the place or photographs taken at that location. Paths were represented by different colored lines.
These iterations were too busy and complex. I chose too many aspects of my image of NYC to show. I wanted to create a non-linear, fragmented narrative of my life in the city but I wanted it to be elegant and simple. So, I decided to only have three layers of information represented. The first layer consisted of the visual representations of landmarks and nodes. The second layer consisted of the story: thoughts, observations, quotes related to the mapped landmarks and nodes. The last layer contained footnotes for non-New Yorkers.
Initially these layers took the shape of a kind of plant. Stems grew from subway stops, branches grew from these stems, and the flowers were nodes and landmarks. The first iteration of this concept looked like an actual plant. After a few days of reflection, I found this to be too cliché for my tastes. I looked again to The Naked City and simplified the concept a bit. Branches are less obvious. The black strokes represent the N, W, R subway lines and the red strokes represents the pedestrian paths I would take to get from the subway stop to my destination.
For the sources of the quotes and observations, I relied mostly on my own unreliable memory. Other source materials included my Twitter entries as well as the diary I keep from time to time. The decision to use a handwritten script, as opposed digital typefaces, was inspired by flipping through my handwritten diary entries. I sacrificed a bit of legibility for authenticity of voice, that I felt perfectly legible digitally set type would not be able to afford .
The next step in this project was to make the map interactive. The platform chosen was Flash for it's animation capabilities. For inspiration I looked at Stamen Design's work, particularly 16thandmission (shown left).
The ideas and trends presented in Leo Manovich’s paper, Information as an Aesthetic Event, also guided the interaction design. In his paper, Manovich presented that idea that interaction be treated as an event. Manovich noted that design at that time, seemed to follow the edict of "form follows emotion".
The kind of event I wanted to convey, was discovery. Layers of emotions would slowly fade in and out to mimic the mental process of focusing on certain types of information on a map. The interface was designed to blend into the artwork and to be almost invisible. Buttons were handwritten
Books
The Image of the City (excerpt) by Kevin Lynch (1960).
The Power of Maps by Denis Wood and John Fels (1992).
The Situationist City by Simon Sadler (1998).
Essays
Information as an Aesthetic Event by Leo Manovich (2007).
Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography by Guy Debord (1955). From The Situationist Anthology edited and translated by Ken Knabb.
Theory of the Dérive by Guy Debord (1958). From The Situationist Anthology edited and translated by Ken Knabb.
Works
16th and Mission by Stamen Design
The Naked City by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn (1959).
Subway map by Erin Jang (2009).
This was an academic project for Visual Culture and Design course at the Georgia Institute of Technology.