five days of being a city cyborg: day 2
Today I walked north up Fifth Avenue to meet a friend for brunch. I encountered two electromagnetic fields while I was there, at 130 5th Avenue and 234 5th Avenue.
It was much harder for me to detect fields today, partly because I’ve found that the tingling of most fields feels a lot like a cool breeze brushing over my fingertips. As it was a little windy, it was way harder to differentiate when I was actually feeling an EM field, and when it was just the breeze. The first field I encountered I had to kneel down and make sure that I was actually feeling it (people gave me some funny looks, for sure).

The photo I ended up choosing was taken at the second location. This spot was odd because I wasn’t expecting to feel anything there — there were no grates or patched areas in the middle of the sidewalk — so it caught me by surprise. I took this image of the long, bare sidewalk, the scaffolding, and the grate next to me that was releasing hot air.

The location made me think about confirmation bias, and the way that my assumption of a correlation between grates and fields reflects how little I actually can know based on what I can feel. Again, the invisible geographies and infrastructures of the city, systems I can only feel around the edges of as if fumbling in the dark. It makes me think of this: “Map of 19th Century Shipping Routes and Nothing Else”.

Despite the title, despite the starkness of “nothing else,” digital humanities scholar Marisa Parham has noted that the map is, in fact, showing something else: the transatlantic slave trade. In Black Haunts in the Anthropocene, she observes:
This image, in which the fact of ships’ movement itself comes to simulate the winds that powered global trade routes, is compelling because it elicits a sense of truth and evidence while simultaneously demonstrating nothing. It is suggestive because we are left to imagine the histories fanned by those dark wisps.
I feel a resonance with that kind of elusiveness, the gap between what something is and the unknown of what it might mean, in working on this project. I thought about evoking that sense of haunting as I worked on today’s Processing sketch, starting, again, by isolating the route I walked today in Photoshop. As I did so, I realized my selector had also picked up elements of the map of New York, hauntings of the city map around the more solid lines of my route. I played with how to bring those faint impressions forward without losing their ethereality in Processing:

I really liked the effect of my first attempt, but wanted a way to make it repeatable:

I started playing with layering in the photo I had taken:

This last one ended up being a bit too much for me, so I dialed it back for my final version. I also added in some Brownian motion (code modified from here), which I feel nicely evokes both my wanderings over the city and the buzziness of the EM field.

