MANHATTAN HENGE
LMCC Open House
125 Madien Lane, New York
Sept. 21, 002006
LMCC Swing Space Residency:
MOVEMENT AND THE CITY
New York City is movement. Movement is the force that continuously composes and recomposes the city. Our project performatively responded to human, built, and natural flows and movements that compose urban public spaces.
We staged and documented topographical signalings of movements that compose New York’s continuous emergence as city, and that put people and objects into unexpected exchanges with one another.
For Manhattan Henge: The Grid Becomes Else, we collaborated with New York City residents and visitors to signal the city’s continuous emergence through and as the movements and flows of the sun’s light. On May 25 and July 12, the sunset aligns precisely with the grid of Manhattan streets. This allows the sun to be dramatically visible at or near the east and west horizons from street level. We distributed postcard invitations and post calls for collaboration, inviting New York City residents and visitors to create digital photographs in response to their experience of Manhattan Stonehenge phenomenon. We asked our collaborators to observe the sunrise and sunset on the day of July 12 and to performatively respond to the sun’s flow of light as it interacts with the city’s built environment. Each collaborator chose a location from which they would experience the effects of the Manhattan Stonehenge sunrise and sunset. At sunrise and sunset on July 12, collaborators photographed, simultaneously, their experiences of the event and the sensations and images of streetscapes, building facades, and river views that it released.
smudge studio does not use media to capture, frame, or encode. We use media instead to release—to open passageways from the fixed to the emergent, from what is experienced and known through habit to what is continuously becoming else. We invite audiences of our documentations to project their imaginations not back to the forces as we experienced them, but out to the city’s, and their own, continuous emergence..
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CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS:
smudge studio invites you to participate in a simultaneous collaborative event with dozens of people across New York City.
Manhattan Henge: The Grid Becomes Else needs your participation anywhere throughout the five boroughs of New York on any or all of the evenings of July 12, 13, and 14th, 002006. On those days between 8:15-8:30 p.m., the sun fully illuminates cross streets on Manhattan’s street grid (except the curved or angled ones) as it sets on each street’s centerline. The phenomenon has been called Manhattan’s Stonehenge, or Manhattanhenge. (Find out more on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5435113)
We invite our collaborators to:
• observe the sunset on any of these three days,
• take a digital photo that responds to your experience of the sun’s flow of light as it interacts with the city’s built environment,
• email your photo to us for display in an exhibition,
• release the city’s street grid to be experienced as else.
