five days of being a city cyborg: day 1

Cassandra H
Sep 1, 2018 · 3 min read

I have a small magnetic implant in my left hand (see here for one explanation of why people do this thing). TL;DR, my magnet allows me to feel electromagnetic fields — which is a super fun thing, especially in New York City, where there’s a lot to feel. Walking around, I often feel what I can only assume are generators running underneath the sidewalks.

So: for my series of completing five projects in five days, I decided to use my weird little sixth sense to create a place-based, cyborg-esque project. Each day, I would set out in a random direction, turn on a GPS tracker on my phone, and keep walking until I felt a field. Whenever I felt one, I would stop, drop a pin at my location, and take a couple of pictures. Then, I would go home and make something out of the experience, using mapping tools and creative tools to play with the data I had collected.

I have done a lot of work on place-based knowledge, but struggle with the idea of unpacking the geographies of the city, where so much of the original land has been written and overwritten. The place-based knowledges here are palimpsest-like, overlapping and often hidden. I’m intrigued by what sort of hidden geographies my magnetic sense might reveal — what sort of patterns, or lack thereof, might I uncover?

I’m also excited to further explore my own relationship to my magnetic sense — can I train myself to be more attentive to the fields that are around me? Can I creatively describe the sensation of touching a magnetic field to a non magnetically-augmented human? And what about the actual limitations of my sense — the embodied knowledge that I am feeling something in a particular place, but the inability to pinpoint exactly what the structure generating the field actually is? How much can I extrapolate, and how much will my geographic sense be limited by the invisibility of the structures that I nevertheless know are there?

For day one of the project, I walked south, toward Washington Square Park. I felt and documented EM fields in four separate places: 19 E 9th Street, 29 E 9th Street, 62 5th Avenue, and 247 Greene Street.

Where I walked today (I stopped off in Bobst library, which is what that mess down by Washington Square Park is!)

Two of these locations were outside NYU buildings, including the one that I ended up using for my creative piece — 247 Greene.

247 Greene Street. That series of grates is where I felt the field, which (again, I assume) means there are generators below the sidewalk.

I took this image and played with it in Photoshop, overlaying the map of where I walked today on top of it and adding transparency to the grates where I felt the field. Then, I added some simple things around the grates in Processing, trying to give a sense of the tingly, buzzing sensation that I felt when I walked over them.

The piece I made based on today’s walk
    Cassandra H

    Written by

    queer white human. writing on indigenous digital media and sf. currently @MFADT learning to make all the things.

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