Along the Way: MTA Arts for Transit

Along the Way is a tour through New York’s underground museum of contemporary art, works commissioned by MTA Arts for Transit for the subway system and commuter rail lines. Vivid murals by Roy Lichtenstein and Romare Bearden convey the energy of Times Square, while Robert Wilson’s Coney Island Baby captures the festive spirit of the city’s playland. Currently underway are a photographic installation by Mike and Doug Starn at the new Fulton Street Transit Center and a large-scale ceramic wall drawing by Sol LeWitt at Columbus Circle.

Initiated in 1985, this collection of site-specific public art now encompasses more than 150 pieces in mosaic, terra-cotta, bronze, faceted glass, and mixed media. The program takes its cue from the original mandate that the subways be designed, constructed, and maintained with a view to the beauty of their appearance, as well as to their efficiency. Arts for Transit is committed to the preservation and restoration of the original ornament of the system and to commissioning new works that exemplify the principles of public art, relating directly to the places in which they are installed and the community around them.

Stigma and the City

New York is like a hot girl in high school. One that’s easy to love, easy to hate, and easy to pretend that you don’t care about at all (since she does not notice you anyway). New York is beautiful, ugly, cruel and kind — all at the same time. They are both high  maintenance and high rent.

My high school experience was surprisingly non-traumatic. I never tried to pretend to be someone I’m not, to hide my geekiness and foreignness.  Strangely enough  that made me feel like I actually fit in, even though  I probably did not.  And while I “missed my chance” in high school, my love affair with New York City is going strong.

Side Note: my high school’s only famous alumni is Larry David, creator of Seinfeld and the inspiration for the character of George Costanza.

Tourists to New Yorkers are what geeks and nerds are to jocks.  This highly insensitive sign in front of the currently inaccessible to the public lobby of the Woolworth Building.

Tourists are not permitted

I spent the last 14 years in New York, but to this day I have not lost the feeling of being a tourist. I constantly carry a brick of a camera with me (mostly in my bag, but often on a strap around my neck) and  gawk at the skyscrapers. Most of my co-workers avoid Times Square like the plague because of all the slow moving tourists. I, on the other hand, feel at home there.

If the tourist is the lowest of New York’s inhabitants, there’s even more gradation. New York is not just Manhattan. There are 4 other boroughs plus Long Island and New Jersey, denizens of which can only reach Manhattan via a bridge or a tunnel and are collectively known as “the bridge and tunnel crowd” .  The moniker is not precise —  there are four other ways to reach the city the I know of:  ferry, water taxi, helicopter taxi, and Roosevelt Island Tram.  I am a proud bridge and tunneler as well.

One of my first jobs in Brooklyn was circular delivery — those annoying little advertisement newspapers that you find wedged into your door or mailbox.  I spent a lot of time methodically crisscrossing  Brooklyn’s street grid, visiting many different neighborhoods.  I used to mark the street map that I visited to make sure that I covered the area that I was supposed to cover. I wonder if they use GPS to insure that the delivery men cover their area now. There are few things that I like more than walking Manhattan’s streets, watching people and arhitecture and taking pictures.

I am thinking of two projects. First – visiting every single street in Manhattan with the help of GPS. I believe that this was done already, as well as my ongoing (but mostly unpublished NYC Tarot photography project). But secondly, I want to take a series of photographs from the middle of Manhattan’s street intersections – there’s something about the view of NYC’s streets from the intersections that fascinates me, and it’s a view that few people explore.

Daddy’s Little Narc

For many years I’ve been passing a DEA museum that was located right in Times Square. Once, after work, I had a bit of time to kill, so I decided to see what was inside. Although there was a bit of a wait to get in as all the visitors’ bags had to be checked, the admission was free. I am glad I went there, as the museum is now closed. I have no idea how they could afford the rent.

The expected, yet educational portion of the exibits was not particularly interesting. Bongs, rolling papers, pipes and old Laudanum bottles. Big whoop.

Ecstasy tablets with funny logos and such. Also not very exciting.

But I think the people who came up with the idea of this museum and funded it smoked some of the exhibits, as the big installation pieces were rather artistic and surreal.

There was this interactive exhibit where you stand in what looks like a cheap motel room, but then you flick a switch and a wall slides over, showing you that your hypothetical neighbor is probably engaged in some illicit activities.

Even more surreal was a recreation of a Columbian cocaine lab, right in front of a glass window facing a busy Manhattan street.

Unfortunately it was late and the gift shop was closed and dark, but I spied this adorable little item:

Soviet Realism In The Subway

During its renovation Times Square seems to have been steadily acquiring the biggest and ugliest modern mosaics. The architects seem to have forseen the ugliness of the mosaics and strategically used lighting with a lot of glare to mercifully obscure the them from view. Still, even ugly Soviet Realism style “The Return of Spring” by Jack Beal is a little better than water stained cracked tile.

Looking more closely though, some weird details become apparent. First of all, what is the guy with the hammer going to hit? Looks like one of the three guys in front of him. Also it looks like they are prying open a manhole, but it takes only one guy usually and they use a tool like this. The guy with a jackhammer seems intent on injuring the guy next to him too.

But what is going on with this guy’s hand?

iPhoto Retro or John Sculley’s Gift To The World of Photography

I collect 20th century technology antiques. They are not expensive and don’t take up much space – perfect for my cubicle museum.

My shelf at work houses a small, but growing collection of monstrous early cellphones. There are a couple of gigantic vacuum tubes (some from an early Univac), a core memory plane, a multiprocessor unit from an Amdahl mainframe, a weird hardwired logic unit from a forgotten computing machine. My latest purchase is rather interesting – the first consumer digital camera.

A $700 piece of equipment in 1994 Apple Quicktake 100 cameras sell for just a few bucks on eBay. I first saw one mentioned in this outstanding livejournal post. This guy’s camera still had some images in it which provided a weird time tunnel into some office party in 1994. I guess the people in the photos were celebrating extravagant Mac purchases.

I bought two cameras on eBay for just a few bucks each, and one came with a cable and a floppy with PC software. Not even hoping that it’d work I plugged in the serial cable, installed the software on my Win 2000 machine, turned on the camera and ran the program. It worked the first time.

Here are the two Apple QuickTake 100’s that I purchased. I bought two so I could take stereo images and view them on my 100 year old stereoscope. In a couple of years I think I’ll be able to buy a couple of iPod photo thingies for a few bucks and do what this guy did.

Times Square at night in full .3 megapixel power (compressed to 500 width).

Times Square at night with lower resolution option turned on

Snow storm in Brooklyn

Considering how difficult lighting conditions were the results are respectable. Usability wise these cameras are lacking. Even though they look like those binoculars from Star Wars movies, they have a very nasty lens cover that is very hard to open without leaving a nice fingerprint on the lens. Taking portrait orientated pictures is rather hard.

So here I am, paying tribute to one of the last Apple products of John Sculley’s era at Apple (note how Apple CEOs are arranged in a timeline at Wikipedia – just like kings). I wonder if Steve Jobs will ever consider making an Apple digital camera. So far the fate of Apple Newton shows that to Jobs anything ever touched by Sculley is taboo.

Cap’n Deadprogrammer And The Hunt for the Giant Robot

On the day when Kottke posted his crappy cellphone snap of the giant robot in Times Square I dragged my co-workers to go see it. The robot must have flown away since the morning leaving behind only stupid Naked Cowboy and his admirers. Because I know that the tighty-whity wearing scourge of Times Square sometimes subsists solely on soy nuts and coffee, it was probably a good idea to keep my distance.

Or was Kottke’s photo a hoax? I guess it could be done with a toy robot – the photo is grainy enough. Everybody seems to be just reposting it with or without credits. A giant square probably lousy with camera carrying bloggers – and no other pictures at all? What gives?

Conde Nast Antenna

Just at the entrance to the lobby of the building where I work you can see this strangely framed view of the new Shively 6016-3/4 Master Antenna at the top of the Conde Nast building. The silhouette looks kind of like a B2 Spirit bomber, doesn’t it?

The Conde Nast building is located at 4 Times Square. I guess they didn’t hear about the magic properties of number 4.

Check out Shively Labs photo gallery of their projects. The view from the top of Conde Nast building is amazing.

999

The scary thing about the newer Rockefeller center buildings is that from Times Square they look kind of like the perished World Trade Center towers. If you add outright “satanistic” “999 Pharmaceutical” and “DOG” ads and a jet plane trail, the picture becomes even scarier.

Lehman Brothers: Matrix Reloaded.

Turns out the Lehman Brothers led display is modular. One morning I’ve seen the maintenance people changing some burned out leds.

Some interesting stuff I learned from http://videosystems.com/ar/video_new_dimensions/ :
One Reality Check project involves a corporate installation in Times Square in New York City. It’s a huge, animated sign on the side of the Lehman Brothers building. The sign shows a mix of animation, information, messages, and mood based on changes in market news, the weather, time of day, or Lehman’s discretion.

The sign is a huge system of LEDs, 5340×736, that stretches vertically from the third floor to the fifth floor of the building. Horizontally, the sign wraps around the building from halfway down the 49th Street side across the entire length of building facing Times Square, then halfway down the 50th Street side. Uniquely, the building’s windows are not obscured by the sign. Rather, the sign is built around them.

By incorporating the sign into the building’s facade, the architects, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, followed the letter and the spirit of a new city ordinance pushed by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. That ordinance required any new construction in Times Square to have electronically lit signage with a size compensatory to the size of the building. While on many buildings those signs are little more than placards jutting off a facade — a giant Coke bottle or lit billboard — the Lehman Brothers building is itself an electronic sign.

Of course, the odd shape of three large horizontal bands connected by narrow vertical bands of LEDs between the windows of the building begs non-standard content. There are no 4:3 video images here to captivate the tourists.

The sign is kind of cool. I sometimes go to the Starbucks across the street to sit there and watch it.