five days of being a city cyborg: day 1
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.

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

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.

