In NY A/V, one of my audio/video mapping explorations of cities, (fig. 3), 636 stationary video shots zooming north on Manhattan on Broadway Street were taken from sunrise to sunset for a period of seven days. The ubiquitous Broadway Street, the only street deviating from the grid of the city while traversing the entire island, served as the axis by which these slices of the city were collected and assembled. “In axial ‘step and shoot’ acquisitions” CT format, each take, each zoom, each section-cut of the city was collected as a series of slices walking the length of Broadway Street; (9) “between each shot there is a 15-minute wait that involves the walk north [one third of a city’s bock length] and the set-up of the next shot. By walking the city slowly—minute-by-minute, block–by-block—over the period of seven days, one is consumed in a process that clearly observes, a process that discovers the city”. (10) Like the axial CT scan format in which “each slice/volume is taken and then the table is incremented to the next location” and later connected, these numerous section-cuts were connected in post-production editing into one continuous zoom through the city, a seemingly continuous take which fades in and out of days into nights while collecting the life of the city during that particular week in July 2001. (11) In particular the project uses the cine acquisition method of CT-scans in which temporality is important. In medical terms, this method evaluates “blood flow, blood volume and mean transit time. Cine is a time sequence of axial images…” where “xray is delivered at a specified interval and duration”. (12)
In looking at the tomography of this city, as we inhabited and traveled this line, “we understand the city in its entirety as a physical entity that lives, throbs, changes”. (13) It like a human body is composed of “dynamic processes and flows” of activities and interactions which define the interiority of the city. In the process of collecting the information, “each day, the investigator, through the view-finder, was entranced by a different story, by a different place as the various personalities of the city were experienced. Like novelist Italo Calvino’s recount of Venice in Invisible Cities, each day along this line, as we traveled the city, was as if a different place – as if a different story has taken place. By this trajectory, we inhabited seven places in seven days, yet remained in once place”. (14)
9 See CT-scan in wikipedia
10 Skinner, Martha. South to North: Zoom/Section Seven Day Trajectory on Broadway Street. In South edited by Ronald Rael, 30-39. Clemson School of Architecture, 2005, p. 32
11 See CT-scan in wikipedia
12 See CT-scan in wikipedia
14 Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities, Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1972, Skinner, Martha. South to North: Zoom/Section Seven Day Trajectory on Broadway Street. In South edited by Ronald Rael, 30-39. Clemson School of Architecture, 2005, p. 32
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